PLANNING FROM THE FUTURE

PLANNING FROM THE FUTURE A PHASE ONE ANALYSIS The Bureau for Population, Refugees and Migration [PRM] of The United States Department of State Prepar...
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PLANNING FROM THE FUTURE A PHASE ONE ANALYSIS The Bureau for Population, Refugees and Migration [PRM] of The United States Department of State

Prepared by the Humanitarian Futures Programme King’s College London Final Report November 2008 FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY

Preface The Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) of the U.S. Department of State would like to thank the Humanitarian Futures Program (HFP), particularly Dr. Randolph Kent and Ms. Stacey White, for the comprehensive analysis and recommendations. PRM also appreciates the generous support of the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which funded this project. It is difficult to chart a course of improvement within an organization if there is no objective review of its current direction and operations. As PRM approaches the 30th anniversary of its creation, this timely study offers the opportunity for critical review of the Bureau in order to prepare for future challenges. The HFP analysis thus inspired PRM to embark on a long-term strategic planning project to assess how the Bureau has transformed over its first 30 years and lay a template for the way forward. The HFP analysis offers several recommendations that resonate in comments by PRM’s external stakeholders. Among the HFP suggestions, the need to strengthen interagency synergies with USAID, the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security and other U.S. government agencies is a top priority for PRM. Coordination between agencies with differing mandates and responsibilities is essential to meeting humanitarian needs in conflict zones and stability operations, closing the relief-to-development gap, and resettling refugees in the United States. PRM’s position within the State Department ensures that humanitarian assistance to those displaced by conflict are closely linked to and supported by the political and diplomatic activities of the State Department to find

permanent solutions to such complex emergencies. PRM is also working to widen its analytic circle through more systematic and routine engagement with academics, field practitioners and other policy experts on emerging issues. As resources and security protocols allow, PRM will take advantage of networking systems that new technologies offer. PRM will also seek to strengthen corporate and philanthropic ties in an effort to share best practices and innovations, as well as to expand the financial and policy resources devoted to humanitarian response. PRM has already begun to implement the report’s recommendation regarding empowering partners, from actively supporting the results-based management reforms at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to hosting seminars for non-governmental organizations with best practices in writing program objectives and indicators. The major obstacles that prevent PRM from implementing some of the HFP recommendations relate to the Bureau’s mandate and role within a much larger U.S. government structure and international humanitarian community. By their nature, complex emergencies involve political, economic, social, and security factors in addition to humanitarian concerns that require a nuanced, multi-faceted approach. Creating strategic endstates, while a useful internal exercise, can be fraught with diplomatic, military, and development policies beyond PRM’s scope or ability to influence. In addition, limited administrative resources make it difficult in any governmental organization to promote innovation. For instance, such administrative constraints prevent PRM from holding an annual forum; however, the Bureau will explore the possibility of participating in ex

isting international fora that address longer-term issues of forced migration and humanitarian action. Despite these constraints, all of the report’s recommendations generated useful discussion and ideas among PRM staff. PRM will work within its current parameters to establish careerrecognition programs for innovative ideas, as the HFP analysis recommends. The HFP exercise helped PRM to analyze objectively its current practices and determine what it can improve upon immediately and what it can work toward in the long-term. The recommendations inspired and established the base for a longterm strategic plan that will guide the Bureau into the next decade with the information, analytic network, and expertise required to best meet the



humanitarian needs of refugees, conflict victims, internally displaced persons, and other vulnerable populations around the world.

Kelly Clements Director Office of Policy and Resource Planning Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration U.S. Department of State



Executive summary Overall objectives

Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance [DCHA] as well as from the Department of State’s Bureau for Population, Refugees and MiThe complexities, interrelationships, dimengration [State PRM].1 Eight staff members from sions and dynamics of humanitarian threats State over the next two decades will require an apPRM took part in the exercise conducted during the proach for anticipating and responding to crises period from June through October 2007.2 Prelimithat are significantly different from those of the nary results were reviewed with PRM management present. The greater the flexibility and agility, in Washington, DC on 18 January 2008 and subseand the more attention given to innovation and quently by telephone in speculative analysis, the early February 2008. This more readily will organiThe abiding issue for PRM is the extent report, focusing on PRM’s zations be able to adapt to which it is able to understand and role within the context of adapt to the emerging dynamics of fuand respond to change. humanitarian action, is one ture humanitarian crises - crises that will necessarily require it to adjust its view of of three reports prepared A PRM of the future will forced migration as isolated phenomena by HFP under Phase One both in terms of cause and response. have to have the capacity of the Planning from the for understanding and Future project. formulating policies that relate to a confluence of factors impacting on popuFindings, conclusions and lation movements, ranging across many sectors and disciplines. Multilateral organizations and their dorecommendations nors will not only need to be able to anticipate and prepare for unprecedented threats to human security, PRM has demonstrated considerable capacity in rethey will also need to be able to take advantage of cent years to respond to the changing nature of windows of opportunity and to identify new ways of forced migration and to the environments in which doing things for the greater assistance and protecsuch migration occurs. It continues to influence its tion of populations at risk. operational partners to adapt to such new challenges The Planning from the Future project, undertaken through the Humanitarian Futures Programme, King’s College, London, is a futures ca- pacity assessment and enhancing exercise. It comprises the contributions of 67 staff members from eight different offices of the USAID

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and appears well regarded among those partners. In a very fundamental sense, however, PRM is a product of a different age and a different set of assumptions. It is the view of the HFP team that the current functions and capacity of PRM will not be adequate to address some of the inter-related factors that it will have to face in the future. Nor for that matter will

Phase One of this project was funded by OFDA.

Seven staff members completed the OSAT and took part in key informant interviews. One staff member, the PRM military liaison officer, took part in the Scenario Development Exercise only.

PRM, in its current form, be able to contribute to the sort of strategic analyses that are needed to link emerging large-scale vulnerability issues such as scarcity of resources, the collapse of state structures and climate change to the emergence of new and changing migratory patterns. HFP’s broader proposition in the context of the Planning from the Future project is that the USG as a whole is not adequately structured to respond to what some have called the catastrophes of the future.3 This conclusion is in no sense to raise the specter of yet another 16th century Nostradamus, but rather to suggest that there are actions that can be undertaken, and indeed must be undertaken, now to prepare for a future which in a humanitarian sense is less and less certain. This in effect is a call for a restructured USG humanitarian regime. It is by no means a new refrain. To the contrary, many important components of such restructuring have preoccupied the US Department of State and USAID over the last decades and, most recently, during the 2007-2008 Foreign Assistance Reform process. Without delving into this most recent process in any detail, it is evident that one of the challenges that the proponents of reform have faced is the need to generate greater strategic coherence and synergy among the various aid institutions within the USG. In that context, PRM needs to become a much greater actor – not in terms of institutional growth but in the use of its present and potential capacities to strengthen a wider USG system. More specifically, as one looks to the future, the US aid establishment will in any event require a machinery that is able to anticipate vulnerability trends and, in the case of PRM, to relate these trends to new dimensions of migration.

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The HFP team regards the recommendations arising from the findings and conclusions outlined in this report as steps towards a longer-term objective of greater institutional coherence, integration and synergy within the USG’s aid structure. Whilst the list of recommendations to follow is meant in the first instance to reinforce the primary roles of PRM as originally conceived, i.e. (1) to take primary responsibility for formulating policies on population, refugees and migration, (2) to coordinate US international population policy and (3) to administer and monitor US contributions intended to assist and protect refugees abroad, it is also, in the longer-term, designed to enhance PRM’s contributions and influence over the inevitable changes that will undoubtedly be carried out in the future to restructure USG machinery for humanitarian action. A summary of the 12 recommendations put forth in this report is as follows: [1] Promoting institutional synergy Only much greater levels of cooperation at all levels between PRM and USAID will ensure the necessary weight in terms of political support and resources to respond quickly and appropriately to the unprecedented forced migration movements anticipated for the future. PRM should work more intensively with USAID to promote far greater integrated longer-term strategic analysis and planning; [2] Exploiting PRM’s leadership role PRM has devoted a great deal of effort with relatively little available staff time to build and nurture strong relationships with reputable multi-lateral organizations. There remains a persistent gap, however, in the realms of research and innovation, and it seems clear that given PRM’s reputation in the field of forced migration, it is well placed to take the lead in the convening of an international annual forum to

Randolph Kent et al., Responding to Catastrophes: US Innovation in a Vulnerable World, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC, March 2008.

discuss the impacts of longer-term issues on forced migration; [3] Widening PRM’s analytic circle Like many organizations with growing humanitarian responsibilities and comparatively declining resources, PRM is faced with the challenge of prioritizing the immediate over the longer-term “speculative.” In order to promote longer-term analysis, PRM should take advantage of futures-oriented analytical and problem-solving alternatives in the form of internet-based networks such as InnoCentive4; [4] Promoting strategic “end states” Generally speaking, the humanitarian sector and those organizations responsible for refugees and IDPs do not think in terms of strategies with specific “end-states” or clear operational objectives. Following from an alternative assumption that it might indeed be possible to define “endstates” within the forced migration sector, PRM should encourage greater clarity from its implementing partners about the ultimate objectives of their operations; [5] Promoting the development dimension One of the challenges that organizations with humanitarian roles and responsibilities will increasingly have to confront is supporting populations at risk and in particular refugee and internally displaced communities in states where government authorities have no capacity to address their needs. Within this context, PRM will have to see its own strategic-operational alignment in terms of a more holistic approach, one that calls on it to partner more systematically with development organizations in its day-to-day work; 4

[6] Prioritizing information needs While the USG has a wide array of information gathering and analytical capacities, it would seem to have few mechanisms for bringing together information that reflects prioritized humanitarian crisis drivers, including all those factors associated with large-scale forced migration. PRM should promote the set-up of a collaborative information system that includes at a minimum: [i] regular scenario exercises; [ii] internalexternal interactive information and analysis groups; and [iii] futures group networks to provide regular updates on prioritized issues; [7] Establishing an integrated internal information system In addition to pushing for a general collation of external information related to forced migration, PRM needs to develop its own integrated and inter-active information system, a system that would focus upon core activities such as monitoring and evaluation, performance vis-à-vis defined “end states” [see Recommendation 4, above], potential emerging threats and innovations that might reduce and/or mitigate such threats. Such as system might be provided via TWikis or other internet-based program management platforms already utilized by private sector companies; [8] Creating a risk communication strategy PRM should prioritize a more proactive risk communications campaign to emphasize the importance of focusing upon the potential consequences of longerterm threats upon forced migration, ways to offset these and the necessity of preparing now for what might be. The proposed risk communication strategy would be seen to be positive, pro-active and supporting the traditional leadership role of the USG in humanitarian intervention;

InnoCentive, through its Open Innovation Marketplace, connects companies, government agencies, academic institutions and non-profit organizations (the “Seeker” organizations) with a network of more than 125,000 engineers, scientists, inventors, and business people (the “Solver” community), a network that anyone can join.

[9] Strengthening corporate linkages In addition to strengthening collaboration within the USG as well as expanding its external circle beyond its traditional partners, PRM should also consider greater engagement with the corporate sector as part of an effort to promote longer-term durable solutions for those who fall under the broad mandate of PRM. This will be increasingly necessary, since, as the prospect of diminished state capacities for dealing with the consequences of internal or transnational migration increases, the corporate sector in many instances may be the provider of last recourse; [10] More directed use of existing collaborative systems PRM – either directly or through other USG entities – has access to a variety of international systems whose support should be garnered to promote longer-term humanitarian threat analysis, including, among others, the Good Humanitarian Donorship [GHD] to promote



greater information exchange and collaboration on potential humanitarian risks and futures-oriented solutions with other donor governments; [11] Empowering partners A consistent refrain among non-governmental and multilateral organizations is that their donors demonstrate little inclination to promote innovation within the humanitarian sector. PRM, as part of efforts to prioritize information needs and to widen analytic circles, should actively seek and promote innovation among new and present partners through the establishment of career incentive and peer recognitionbased programs. [12] Encouraging innovation within PRM To promote innovative practices among its external partners, PRM will also need to feel comfortable with the concept of innovation within the organization itself. In addition to brown bag lunches and other traditional forums of idea development and exchange already in play, the bureau should employ smart boards, white rooms and other non-traditional creative thinking tools in its everyday work.



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