States bear the responsibility for protecting people displaced internally by conflict and other causes. Though widely recognised, there is little research on how the state shares that responsibility between different levels of government. Colombia serves as a valuable case for examining the evolving coordination between national and local governments. I conduct a thematic analysis of its 2015 Strategy of Co-responsibility regulating emergency humanitarian assistance. I argue that the Strategy represents a delicate compromise between enforcing minimum standards and respecting local autonomy. This means the System essentially reaffirms existing vertical power relations, while also creating incentives for horizontal multilevel governance. The article explores the Strategy’s use of the language of ‘co-responsibility’, a technocratic action-planning process, and capacity-building initiatives. I propose frameworks from the literature on multilevel governance of migration to identify the conditions under which coordination across levels emerges, thereby bridging the multilevel governance and forced migration literatures.
Citation
Weihmayer, M. (2023) Multilevel Governance ‘from Above’: Analysing Colombia’s System of Co-Responsibility for Responding to Internal Displacement, Journal of Refugee Studies