National policies on internally displaced persons : A comparative study on policies inclusiveness of environmental IDP´s in Cambodia and Papua new Guinea

The impacts from climate change is among the most pressing issues that the international community is currently faced with. Climate change makes that thousands of people all over the world are and will continue to be forced to flee from their homes, thus becoming displaced. Very little is written about this group of environmental IDP´s and their protection by national policies. This is especially problematic for less developed countries, where little focus is on the IDP´s but where their plight is even more dire. This is due to the fact that those countries to a greater extent lack resources to manage climate change disasters in effective ways. The purpose of this study is to contribute to the debate on IDP´s, and to address the need to involve IDP´s in national policies, in an effort to protect those groups. This research problem was examined through analysing two cases, i.e. the development countries, Cambodia and Papua New Guinea, which have been studied through a qualitative case study with the use of structured focused comparison. The analytical framework used to analyse the findings retrieved from the cases was the Policy implementation process framework, which offered different variables to examine and guide the analysis. This was further complemented by the concept vulnerability, in order to get a more comprehensive picture on influencing variables. The findings illustrate that both cases has managed to introduce extensive policy frameworks on the subject of climate change and environmental disasters, but only PNG explicitly incorporates IDP´s in their policy plan. The study further recognised the shared challenges for both cases on policy implementations. Insufficient human and financial resources due to lack of commitment and mainstreaming at government-levels are the main problems facing both Cambodia and Papua New Guinea. For future research it is therefore important to continue efforts of recognising the need for national protection for environmental IDP´s and to continue evaluating national frameworks