From the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement to the Nansen Initiative: What the Governance of Environmental Migration Can Learn from the Governance of Internal Displacement

Environmental migration is often presented as one of the gravest consequences of environmental
disruptions – climate change in particular, and is already a reality in many parts
of the world. Yet the protection of these migrants is not adequately addressed in the international
normative frameworks on migration. As a result, a growing number of scholars
and advocacy groups have sought to create a special convention and/or an ad hoc status
for these migrants, while others have contended that such a legal status is not the answer.
As a result, the protection of environmental migrants is currently the subject of vigorous
debates amongst scholars and policy-makers, and no clear solution is yet in sight.
Research however has little considered the debates that surrounded the protection of
those displaced within their countries (IDPs) in the 1990s. Both phenomena have sometimes
overlapped, especially as environmental displacement is often internal. Yet, the
debate on IDPs has had some significant success, in particular, the adoption of the Guiding
Principles on Internal Displacement in 1998, and the signature of the Organization for
African Unity’s Kampala Convention in 2009.
This article argues that important lessons can be drawn from the protection of IDPs
in order to inform the current debates on the protection of environmental migrants, as
the political contexts and policy challenges associated with both crises of the migration
regime are often similar. The article identifies such lessons and assesses the opportunities
and caveats of applying a similar approach of soft law to environmental migration – and
what would be needed to achieve it.