Executive Summary
More than 60 percent of refugees worldwide are now estimated to live in urban areas, and increasingly humanitarian agencies are expanding their focus to become engaged with refugees and displaced persons living in cities and towns. Policy and operational shifts are underway, with emphasis on expanding access to protection, self-reliance and essential services among refugees who live in urban and non-camp locations.
Increased urbanization of forced displacement raises new opportunities and challenges in facilitating access to durable solutions, including the capacity and willingness of refugees to return to their countries of origin, and the prospect of increased returns to towns and cities rather than rural locations. With support from the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau for Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM), CWS undertook this research project with the goal of identifying factors that are related with relative success of refugee return to urban areas. Specifically, CWS sought to explore relationships between two variables – (a) place of origin in home countries and (b) place of settlement in countries of asylum – with refugees’ capacity for successful return and reintegration into urban areas.
The project drew on both a review of relevant policy regarding voluntary repatriation and urban and non-camp refugees, and field research conducted in Côte d'Ivoire and Rwanda. Data collection was focused in Gisenyi, Rwanda, a regional city of 106,000 inhabitants, and Bloléquin, Côte d’Ivoire, a town that is home to just over 30,000 persons. This served as an opportunity to examine return dynamics and urbanization in town and small city contexts, which may not receive the same attention from researchers nor humanitarian agencies as do large urban areas.
Policy Context for Urban Returns
UNHCR’s Urban Policy (2009) and Alternative to Camps policy (2014) marked important advances for not only the legitimacy of refugee presence in urban and non-camp locations, but also in recognizing that forcibly displaced persons have agency and make rational decisions in an effort to live in as much safety and with as much dignity as possible. These two policy documents intend to inform the pursuit of durable solutions, though they tend to focus on broad principles rather than specific examples of how urbanization might be factored into planning and implementation of voluntary repatriation or other durable solutions. Two such principles set forth are self-reliance as a means of protection, and that development processes can and should be engaged when responding to displaced persons in urban or non-camp locations. Review of UNHCR policy regarding voluntary repatriation finds that the most recent guidance, issued in 2008, reflected increasing awareness of the significance of return and reintegration to urban areas, and the broader implications of the urbanization of forced displacement on refugee return and reintegration. This marked an evolution from previous guidance issued in 1996 and 2004, which either did not mention specific challenges of return to urban areas, or only noted the risks of returns to cities rather than (presumed rural) areas of origin.
Meanwhile, a UNHCR desk review of projects conducted in 2009 noted that urban reintegration was becoming an accepted theme, but that shifts in program design and implementation had not yet taken root. Registration processes remained based largely on the assumption that intent to return equates with intent to return to place of origin, regardless of whether that is a refugee’s actual intent. Anticipation of spontaneous returns were absent from reintegration planning, and monitoring tended to be based on district or province but not allow for disaggregation of information by municipality or neighborhood. These observations were echoed in a World Bank desk review conducted in 2015, which observed that urbanization within forced displacement is becoming a permanent, not temporary, phenomenon and that facilitated returns only make up a portion of refugee returns to countries of origin.
With this policy context in mind, urbanized refugee settlement in countries of asylum and returns to urban or other non-camp locations may present several opportunities and challenges, including: (a) ensuring strong and meaningful urban refugee participation in the planning and implementation of repatriation initiatives; (b) developing realistic and innovative incentives for well integrated urban refugees to return voluntarily to their country of origin; and (c) identifying additional migration mechanisms that might make urban returns more sustainable. Key findings and recommendations (in sections 6 and 7 of the report) seek to address these and other assumptions set forth in the relevant policy guidance.