SPOTLIGHT ARCHIVE

Foregrounding the voices of people living in three different communities of displacement in Bangladesh, this field research and advocacy report examines the nexus of climate change, loss and damage and displacement. This comprehensive report highlights promising interventions by Bangladeshi civil society organisations that have helped internally displaced people (IDPs) living in protracted displacement move toward durable solutions. It also examines positive developments on the policy front, including Bangladesh's fledgling National Strategy on Internal Displacement Management (NSIDM). At the same time, it calls attention to how Bangladesh's protracted displacement crisis remains under acknowledged and therefore under addressed in national policy and programming.

The drastic funding cuts undertaken by the major donors in 2025 have forced the humanitarian sector into ‘hyper prioritisation’, resulting into its retreat from all activities deemed as non-essential to ensuring immediate survival. This first volume in our series on ‘Internal Displacement in a Changing World Order’ considers the far-reaching consequences that such ‘hyper prioritisation’ carries for the lives of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in humanitarian crises. The analysis shows that, besides already costing lives, hyper prioritisation risks pushing more people into starvation, disease, missed educational opportunities, and shattered livelihoods, thus eroding IDPs’ prospects to embark on the path towards self-reliance and solutions. It concludes by suggesting the need for humanitarian action to be guided, not by the dehumanising exercise of hyper prioritisation, but by the existing clear evidence showing the powerful potential of community-led responses.

This insightful short article from Nepal highlights a promising case study of voluntary 'migration as adaptation' to socio-environmental changes that has allowed rural villages to maintain their vitality in the face of slow-onset climatic hazards, staving off the displacement of entire village populations. Despite the loss of human resources in the villages, voluntary out-migration has helped reshape and revitalise previously faltering rural livelihoods, helping villages remain culturally vibrant and economically viable communities for older people and others who are unwilling or unable to migrate. Notably, in turn, the cultural vibrance of some rural villages compels many migrants to maintain strong ties to their home villages, creating translocal bonds that help support resilience in the face of environmental change.

The displacement of people within their own countries due to crises such as conflicts, disasters, and the effects of climate change is a major contemporary challenge, eliciting global concern about how to protect the displaced. The vast scale of this 'internal displacement' poses far-reaching questions for key debates around humanitarian aid, development, migration, sovereignty, rights, citizenship, identity, and social change. Yet knowledge of the issue is fragmented and highly dispersed across a range of academic and policy domains.

This groundbreaking new publication brings together 45 contributions by leading researchers and practitioners, providing an essential point of reference for advancing these debates and raising the profile of internal displacement as a vital concern for research and policy agendas.