Assessing the Impacts and Costs of Forced Displacement : Volume 1. A Mixed Methods Approach

Globally, over 40 million people have
been forced to leave or flee their homes due to conflict,
violence, and human rights violations either as refugees
outside their country of origin or Internally Displaced
Persons (IDPs). A substantial number live in protracted
displacement where return has not been possible.Forced
displacement is a humanitarian crisis: but it also produces
developmental impacts - short and longer term, negative and
positive - affecting human and social capital, economic
growth, poverty reduction efforts, environmental
sustainability and societal fragility. A prevailing view is
that refugees are a burden on the development aspirations of
host countries and populations and that negative
socio-economic and environmental impacts and costs outweigh
the positive contributions (actual or potential) that
forcibly displaced people might make. The losses incurred by
the displaced populations themselves reinforce perceptions
of vulnerability and dependency and thus assumptions of the
burden they might impose. This study provides such a
methodology. The development and drafting of the methodology
and the state of the art literature review was conducted by
the refugee studies centre, with valuable and constructive
inputs from the partner organizations.