Displacement and decolonisation: refugee participation and leadership in the forced displacement sector

The movement for refugee participation and leadership just hit a five-year milestone: in June 2018, the Global Refugee-led Network (GRN) was born out of the first Global Summit of Refugees, a refugee-led convening that called for greater leadership by forcibly displaced people in decisions about displacement response. This call reverberated across the humanitarian sector, sparking a reckoning that continues today.

At the five-year mark, this issue of Humanitarian Exchange asks three questions about refugee participation and leadership: Where are we? What have we learned? What’s next?

Where we are

The refugee leadership movement has seen some wins. Tools like GRN’s Meaningful Participation Guidelines have helped organisations that are not led by refugees to improve their engagement and solidarity with refugee communities. Multiple governments now include a refugee advisor in their delegations to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

By other measures, progress remains elusive. Refugee leadership within the UNHCR still has little or no traction: an undemocratic system leaves refugees unrepresented on UNHCR’s Executive Committee. This is coupled with tacit patronage agreements that restrict day-to-day agency leadership to candidates from wealthy donor countries.

Refugee-led organisations (RLOs) still receive a negligible percentage of aid funding, even as aid budgets grow to unprecedented levels. Meanwhile, organisations not led by refugees sometimes respond poorly to calls to address systems and practices that exclude and marginalise people with lived experience of forced displacement.

At the same time, refugees continue to lead as they have always done. With or without funding, with or without recognition, refugees organise in their communities to address problems and seek remedies for injustice. Famous examples – such as the multinational gatherings of the 1960s in Dar es Salaam and the international leadership appointments of refugees such as Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Louis Henkin (the latter a drafter of the Refugee Convention) – tell only a fraction of the story. Less-recognised efforts take place every day, in communities around the world, and have for generations. Although conversations about refugee leadership have been trending over the past five years, refugee leadership itself has always existed.

What we’ve learned

While refugee leadership is not new, broad and growing evidence from the past five years affirms that refugee-led organisations are among the most impactful  service-providers and advocates for refugee communities. This overturns an erroneous but prevalent assumption in the humanitarian sector that the most effective or trustworthy organisations are those with proximity to power and resources. It also demonstrates that good leadership may look different from the ways donors, policymakers and other powerful actors tend to envision it.

The past five years have taught us the importance of dismantling faulty or limiting visions of leadership, effectiveness and responsibility. Equally important but perhaps harder to achieve is the dismantling of entrenched systemic barriers. Often, these barriers are created or reinforced by operational structures that implicitly privilege certain people and groups.

Some of the barriers might appear unbiased at first glance, but have inequitable impacts. For example, convenings to discuss policy changes, databases used to manage cooperation between humanitarian service-providers, and financial systems to channel funding to humanitarian operations tend to be designed in ways that assume all individuals involved possess legal status in their country of residence and a valid passport that is safe for them to use. Because such assumptions are frequently incorrect for people who have been forcibly displaced, operational structures that rely on such assumptions are biased in ways that obstruct refugee leadership.

Other barriers are explicitly designed to ensure power remains within a specific group rather being than equitably shared. Many wealthy governments have legal or policy restrictions that privilege humanitarian organisations headquartered and registered in their own country, even when those organisations are not best placed to provide the support refugees seek, or achieve the change they desire. For example, Denmark’s humanitarian policy accords Danish organisations ‘special status’ for ‘both long-term development assistance and acute humanitarian interventions’.

Such policies are problematic not only because changing them can require convincing large numbers of lawmakers or state administrators to agree, but also because power and self-interest intertwine to resist such change. Danish non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which are arguably the best positioned and equipped to convince Danish lawmakers or administrators to change the country’s humanitarian policy, have little direct incentive to do so.

These perverse incentives are not unique to Denmark or to any subset of the humanitarian community. Humanitarian actors that receive preferential outcomes have built on such preferences in myriad ways. Because they are privileged in this way, they receive greater resources and improved positioning, which in turn allows them to achieve better or broader impact, hire more staff, and operate in more locations and communities. Dismantling systems that privilege these actors could have negative consequences for them, even as it opens doors for others – currently privileged actors may have to terminate staff, close operations in places where people today seek their assistance, or accept a reduced voice in policy decisions.

In the face of such consequences, privileged actors have strong incentives to resist changes that expand opportunities for RLOs and other forms of refugee leadership. Even more insidious, a reluctance to embrace these shifts can be excused by, or (at least partly) founded on, good motives. It can be easier for leaders of privileged NGOs to focus on the harms caused to staff who are terminated, or participants who must find new programmes and services, than on the benefits that come from redirecting resources and power to refugee-led initiatives, especially where such benefits are still future prospects rather than contemporary realities.

Designing solutions that shift power to refugee leadership while minimising collateral harm requires creativity and good change management – but also and most importantly, equitable collaboration. What we’ve learned over the past five years is that when humanitarian actors share a genuine commitment to shifting power, well-designed collective approaches can help reach that goal in ways that work for everyone.

The NGO I founded, Asylum Access, has experimented over the past five years with various collaborative approaches aimed at dismantling barriers that keep refugee leaders and refugee-led organisations from accessing power and resources. Asylum Access has used its access to policy dialogues to advocate for the participation of Global South-based and refugee-led organisations in these discussions – which then shifted the ideas proposed, and potentially the decisions made. It built a consensus-based decision-making structure for the Resourcing Refugee Leadership Initiative, the first funding mechanism designed specifically to drive funding to refugee-led organisations, such that each of the six partners (Asylum Access and five RLOs) could contribute and refine ideas and had equal power in strategic decisions. Some initial lessons from these experiments – mistakes and stumbles as well as successes – are captured in the organisation’s Equitable Partnership Guidelines.

Other humanitarian organisations not led by refugees, including some who have written for this issue of Humanitarian Exchange, are using similar strategies to work more equitably and collaboratively with RLOs and their allies. These collective approaches have resulted in new funds flowing to refugee-led organisations, and greater inclusion of refugee leaders and RLOs in policy discussions. Such approaches have generated new ideas and possibilities for dismantling unjust systems while minimising the problems that can accompany big changes.

What’s next

Perhaps the biggest lesson of the past five years is that we still have a lot left to learn – and a long way to go. Many articles in this issue offer practical ways for humanitarian NGOs to support the existing leadership of people experiencing forced displacement and to amplify their power. These are actionable ideas that can help humanitarian actors take the next step on our collective journey toward equitable participation and leadership of refugees in the decisions that affect them.

Looking further ahead on the route, however, the systemic barriers loom large. Most of the lessons thus far have focused on achieving change within humanitarian NGOs. Over the coming five years, my personal hope is that we can broaden our focus to give more attention and energy to the systemic barriers that lie not only within humanitarian organisations but beyond them.

Global governance structures such as the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions are undemocratic in ways that reflect outdated and unjust colonial hierarchies – but also, because they assume that states are proxies for their citizens, they leave refugees fundamentally unrepresented. Even much smaller obvious steps to include refugees in global decision-making are overlooked. For example, UNHCR touts the 2019 Global Refugee Forum as ‘a true milestone in building solidarity with refugees’, but only around 2% of participants were refugees. Increasing that percentage seems like an obvious next step – but the Concept Note for the 2023 forum says nothing about refugee participation, and includes no discussion of plans to address even basic practical barriers such as visas for refugee participants.

Meanwhile, the global legal framework remains a deeply underutilised resource to expand refugees’ participation, leadership and access to rights. International laws establish refugees’ human rights in theory, including foundational rights such as free movement and work as well as specific political participation rights. However, almost no resources or other support are available to refugee-led organisations and their allies to enforce those rights through national courts or international mechanisms such as treaty bodies and regional courts. As a result, mechanisms such as the Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review, human rights treaty complaints processes, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights and others are rarely utilised to push governments to honour their obligations to refugees – even though these mechanisms represent a powerful possibility in advancing refugees’ participation and leadership in decisions that affect them.

These are only a few of the ways in which the humanitarian sector still has a long way to go in ensuring refugees are central decision-makers in forced displacement response. The good news is that the movement for refugee participation and leadership is just beginning. Humanitarians, both refugees and their allies, have an opportunity to grow the movement together, ensuring it is powerful enough to achieve its boldest visions. This issue of Humanitarian Exchange is one way the humanitarian sector is coming together to assess the journey so far and prepare for our next steps, side by side.

Emily Arnold-Fernández is the founder and former CEO of Asylum Access.