Advancing refugee self-reliance: A Proposal for the Global Compact on Refugees

Aside from isolated examples of its use, local integration has been the third rail of refugee protection for several decades. For reasons too numerous to review here, a default model of protection evolved that asked countries of first asylum to provide land (maintain asylum space and open borders) while the international community supported refugees until they could repatriate or resettle, often called the “care and maintenance” approach.

One consequence of this reality is that the solution of local integration has been underdeveloped. All but removed from the toolbox, it has not benefitted from the decades of learning and refinement that resettlement, repatriation and other interventions have undergone. Evidence of this is apparent in UNHCR literature in which both targets and outcomes on local integration are notably absent due to lack of defined measurement criteria. In the 2016 Global Trends report, naturalization statistics are offered as a “crude proxy” with many caveats on their unreliability.