Using personal stories, honest reflections, and examples of newer research led by refugees and local researchers, the blog asks whether today’s changing research landscape might finally reshape how evidence informs humanitarian action.

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1. Event Report – UNHCR at 75: Challenges and Opportunities

On 26 November 2025, LERRN in partnership with the Global Academic Interdisciplinary Network (GAIN), hosted a webinar titled “UNHCR at 75: Challenges and Opportunities.” The webinar was moderated by Liliana Jubilut, co-chair of GAIN. The panel consisted of four speakers: Jeff Crisp, research associate at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, Jean Marie Ishimwe, East Africa regional lead of Refugees Seeking Equal Access at the Table (R-SEAT), Ruvendrini Menikdiwela, assistant high commissioner for protection at the UNHCR, and James Milner, LERRN’s project director. The distinguished panel was joined by 98 participants online from 22 countries across the world.

With people displaced worldwide, the global refugee regime is confronting an unprecedented level of complexity and scale in forced displacement. This magnitude—further compounded by budget cuts and the withdrawal of political and humanitarian commitments by major donor countries—has raised critical questions about the capacity of leading organizations to effectively respond to the needs of refugees, stateless persons, internally displaced persons, and other forcibly displaced populations. On the eve of UNHCR’s 75th anniversary, this webinar convened academics, civil society actors, and refugee leaders to reflect on the organization’s historical role and its future in the global refugee regime. Ahead of the Global Refugee Forum Progress Review in Geneva later this month, the panel discussed both the obstacles and opportunities facing UNHCR in the current political climate and offered suggestions for future action. The panelists collectively agreed that in order to adequately safeguard refugee protection in an increasingly turbulent world, stakeholders must work towards greater solidarity, inclusion, and multilateral collaboration that centers refugees’ lived experience and expertise. 

Menikdiwela opened the session by noting that has evolved over the past 75 years in response to the changing context and increasing complexity of forced migration. She outlined the agency’s expanded scope—now encompassing stateless persons and, in some cases, internally displaced people—and its three core pillars: international protection, durable solutions, and adherence to the humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence. She emphasized the need for national and international support that benefits both refugees and host communities, while highlighting five key challenges: the scale of mass displacement driven by protracted conflicts, a shrinking humanitarian space and the politicization of asylum, persistent funding gaps and staffing shortages, the growing complexity of displacement, and the accelerating global climate crisis. To address these challenges, Menikdiwela underscored the importance of reliable data, cross-sector and inter-agency collaboration, participatory research, and inclusive practices that amplify refugees’ expertise. She highlighted how partnerships with academia and refugee-led organizations (RLOs), along with localization and multidisciplinary approaches, can strengthen the global refugee regime’s effectiveness and legitimacy.

Reflecting on 75 years of leadership in emergency response, protection, and the pursuit of durable solutions, Menikdiwela emphasized that UNHCR’s mandate remains as vital and relevant today as it was at its inception.

James Milner outlined several current challenges shaping discourse around the functioning of the global refugee regime and UNHCR’s mandate: a collapse in funding as traditional donors redirect resources toward defense rather than protection; rising political hostility to the asylum regime that undermines foundational refugee and human rights norms; and declining confidence in multilateralism. Despite this context, Milner expressed optimism, noting that the regime has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to adapt to geopolitical shifts. He reminded the audience that geopolitics have shaped UNHCR’s evolution since the early days of the Cold War. These transformations, he argued, have also created openings for stronger refugee-led responses, increased leadership from the Global South, and the emergence of new norms that may positively reform the regime. Looking ahead, Milner highlighted the importance of cooperation among like-minded actors and states, along with greater civil society participation—particularly by refugee-led organizations—as a pathway toward more effective co-governance within the regime. He underscored the value of innovative approaches and collective efforts aligned with the principles of the , including locally produced knowledge and equitable partnerships.

Drawing on his personal experience working in East Africa— a region that is both a host and a producer of displaced persons—where meaningful refugee participation is becoming an emerging norm, Ishimwe emphasized the need to restructure the system by placing refugee leadership at the core of the refugee regime. He argued that partners must move beyond tokenistic approaches to participation and instead ground their policies and programming in collective solidarity and genuine recognition of refugees as experts and innovators, rather than as burdens or aid-dependent populations. He noted that while East Africa is seeing a growing number of refugee-led organizations (RLOs), these groups often struggle for recognition and sustainable funding, as governments and institutions frequently limit their role to consultation rather than leadership. True progress, Ishimwe suggested, requires resetting the humanitarian system with new leadership; institutionalizing meaningful refugee participation at the center of the system beyond project-based engagement; and positioning refugees in executive roles to ensure that policies and programs are effective, just, and reflective of their needs, aspirations, and lived realities.

Jeff Crisp shifted the conversation to the role of academia in shaping UNHCR’s policies, programs, and practices, and examined the extent to which academic research influences the organization’s mandate. He noted that while independent research has helped shape UNHCR’s broader intellectual framework—informing policy agendas on issues such as repatriation, refugee mobility, and refugee-led organizations—its direct impact on UNHCR’s day-to-day policies and practices has been difficult to measure. Crisp suggested that some of these challenges stem from academics’ tendency to use inaccessible language, produce research in formats misaligned with policy needs, or propose studies at moments when they are not actionable. Academic work also sometimes overlooks localized knowledge or recommends solutions that do not align with current priorities or available resources. From the organizational side, Crisp observed that UNHCR’s engagement with academia has historically depended heavily on leadership support, including initiatives like the open-access working paper series and partnerships with research centers worldwide. However, he noted that this support has declined in recent years due to growing skepticism toward independent researchers and, at times, an unwillingness to hear critiques of the organization. He recommended revitalizing and strengthening these relationships through timely, innovative collaborations—rather than simply expanding tokenistic networks.

Q&A Discussion

During the Q&A session, panelists’ interventions sparked a vibrant discussion in response to questions submitted by the audience. With growing concern that the regime is facing its most profound crisis—and that the protection of refugee rights may be at risk—the panelists were asked to share their calls to action for global leaders and their vision for UNHCR’s future.

In response, Milner emphasized that no single actor can reform the regime without broad consensus and multisectoral collaboration; UNHCR relies on partnerships to fulfill its mandate, and the importance of collective action cannot be overstated. Crisp called for a reassessment of UNHCR’s scope and activities to ensure the organization prioritizes its core mandate of refugee protection. Ishimwe stressed the centrality of refugee participation and the need for a mindset shift toward a system accountable not only to donor countries but to refugees themselves. He added that while the system may not yet be prepared for refugees to lead, such a paradigm shift is essential for meaningful change.

In their concluding remarks, all panelists underscored the importance of centering lived experience and localized knowledge in policy and programming. They recommended leveraging new technologies to co-create knowledge with researchers who have lived experience of displacement, using prominent platforms to elevate the work of refugee researchers, allocating sustainable funding to RLOs, and—most importantly—expanding refugee participation beyond storytelling to genuine leadership and substantive influence in executive spaces, ensuring participation is meaningful rather than performative.

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In this article, LERRN Partner Jeff Crisp takes a critical look at the UN’s refugee agency, identifying the key characteristics of its organizational culture and providing advice to individuals and organizations who are endeavouring to influence the agency’s positions, policies and programmes.

Introduction

As a former and long-term UNHCR staff member (1987-2013) who has also worked with a number of NGOs (Refugees International, Refugee Council, United Against Inhumanity), I am often asked to provide advice with respect to the most effective ways for advocates and activists to interact with the organization. This paper is intended to offer such guidance.

A state-centric organization

Perhaps the most important characteristic of UNHCR for refugee advocates and activists to understand is the organization’s fundamentally state-centric nature. The agency was founded by states, is funded by states, has a governing body comprised of states, has its budget approved by states, and can only operate in the field with the permission of states and under conditions that are imposed by states.

As part of the UN system, moreover, UNHCR’s policies, positions and programmes are inevitably influenced by the UN Secretariat’s and the UN Secretary-General’s need to maintain a harmonious relationship with Member States, especially the five Permanent Members of the Security Council. Having a Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, who previously spent a decade as High Commissioner for Refugees, has not changed that situation, as seen in his recent reluctance to intervene in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, despite the massive number of refugees and displaced people that it has created.

In that context, we should also not forget that Russia, along with many other states that have created large numbers of refugees (Ethiopia, for example) and who routinely violate refugee rights (such as Greece), are member of UNHCR’s governing body, the Executive Committee.

With respect to governments, UNHCR has a particularly close relationship with the USA, which provides around 40 per cent of the organization’s budget and which has traditionally nominated the organization’s Deputy High Commissioner. UNHCR is consequently reluctant to publicly criticize the administration in Washington, something that became particularly apparent when Donald Trump was in office, pursuing an aggressively anti-refugee policy and cutting the funds of other UN agencies such as UNRWA and the World Health Organization.

In my experience, UNHCR staff can be insufficiently aware of (or even in denial about) the state-centric nature of their organization. Rather than seeing it as an agency with some important and state-induced structural constraints, there is a tendency within the organization to perceive UNHCR as the forthright, indefatigable and primary defender of refugee rights on the global stage. As I will suggest later, this strong self-image makes the organization particularly sensitive to external scrutiny and criticism.

Having said that, it would be wrong, as some commentators have done, to suggest that UNHCR is under the direct command of governments, and that its international staff members are uncaring bureaucrats who are only concerned with their personal advancement. Many of its personnel are highly committed to the refugee cause. And while UNHCR cannot be described as a wholly autonomous organization, it enjoys a limited or relative form of autonomy that derives from its legal mandate, its moral authority, its professional experience and competence. In those respects, UNHCR has more influence than large international NGOs such as Oxfam, CARE or World Vision.

For advocates and activists, a key objective must be to ensure that UNHCR maintains and expands the degree of autonomy that it enjoys, using its limited freedom of manoeuvre to challenge states that are undermining refugee rights, even if they are major donors to the organization or hosts to large refugee populations.

An excellent example of this is to be seen in the vigorous manner that UNHCR has opposed the UK’s new Borders Act and, more specifically, the refugee deportation deal that the British government has concluded with Rwanda. Within the constraints I have already mentioned, it is difficult to think that UNHCR could have been any more outspoken than it has been in relation to the externalization of British asylum policy.

At the global level, UNHCR has somewhat belatedly recognized that the process of externalization, especially when manifested in the relocation of refugees from prosperous countries in the Global North to poorer countries in the Global South, represents an existential threat to the international refugee regime and to UNHCR’s role at the very centre of that system. Thus, in speaking up for refugees, UNHCR is also speaking up for its own survival. And that is a point worth stressing by advocates and activists who interact with the organization.

UNHCR and public advocacy

It is very difficult to measure with any precision the changing extent to which UNHCR is prepared to take a firm public stand on refugee protection issues. And as the organization’s staff members are always quick to point out, public statements are not the only form of advocacy or intervention that UNHCR can undertake. Many discussions and negotiations with both states and non-state actors are – sometimes out of choice and sometimes out of necessity – held confidentially and behind closed doors.

Having said that, and on the basis of my own experience, I would argue that UNHCR’s commitment to strong public advocacy has diminished in recent years. And in its place, we have witnessed the development of an external relations strategy that is dominated by fund-raising, marketing, branding, human interest stories, celebrity endorsement, social media and show-business activities.

Of course, UNHCR is not alone in this respect, and even a traditionally conservative organization such as the ICRC has moved to some extent in this direction. But UNHCR appears to have embraced the marketing-based and ‘soft advocacy’ approach more enthusiastically and wholeheartedly than many other humanitarian organizations.

UNHCR would, I am sure, argue that its external relations activities have raised the profile of the organization and increased the funding available to it, thereby enabling the agency to work more effectively on behalf of refugees and other displaced people. And there is some truth to that argument. UNHCR has in recent years attained high levels of what its social media personnel media would probably describe as ‘brand recognition’.

But I would also suggest that UNHCR’s current approach has also come at a cost, as seen, for example, in the amount of time, effort and resources that the organization now devotes to self-promotion; in its mindless reproduction of the UNHCR logo at every conceivable opportunity; in its sometimes misleading use of statistics; in its selective use of unrepresentative refugee stories and photos; and in its efforts to cultivate closer relations with private sector companies.

While UNHCR prides itself on being ‘innovative’, the organization has in fact been very willing to employ the methods of slick commercial advertising and has not encouraged an open debate about the way in which it frames the refugee issue and its own relationship with refugees. Indeed, as indicated by its awkward response to recent refugee protests in Libya, Tunisia and Indonesia, UNHCR finds it difficult to cope with situations in which refugees speak up for themselves and criticize the organization that claims to represent their interests.

In this respect, advocates and activists have an important role to play in monitoring and commenting on UNHCR’s public relations and promotional activities and, more importantly, ensuring that those activities do not become a substitute for effective public advocacy on behalf of refugees. In that context, and while I have praised UNHCR’s role in challenging the UK’s current refugee policy, there are other situations where the organization could have been more transparent and vocal.

To give just a few examples, these include the EU’s continuing support for the Libyan Coast Guard and its strategy of interception, return and detention; the preparation and planning for the repatriation of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and the relocation of those refugees to the remote island of Bhasan Char; and the summary return of Cubans and Haitians interdicted at sea by the US, which denies them the opportunity to submit an asylum application.

Reflection and research

On this issue I have to declare a personal interest. Shortly after Antonio Guterres became High Commissioner, he asked me to establish a new unit, the Policy Development and Evaluation Service (PDES), that combined a number of related functions: first, the development of new policies on global issues such as UNHCR’s role in relation to urban refugees, internally displaced people, refugee return and reintegration, mixed migratory movements and climate-related displacement; second, the evaluation of UNHCR operations in the field and the identification of lessons learned that could be transferred from one programme to another.

A third role of PDES was to act as a focal point for UNHCR’s relations with universities, think-tanks and policy institutes, and to administer a publication programme that included the working paper series ‘New Issues in Refugee Research’. Finally, the unit was responsible for providing input to speeches and statements made by the High Commissioner and other members of the agency’s senior management team.

In my experience this constituted a very coherent set of functions, providing UNHCR with a robust capacity to reflect on its own activities and to ensure that its policies were both evidence-based and that they took account of the thinking undertaken by external actors. We were aided in that respect by the fact that the High Commissioner allowed PDES to act with a high degree of independence, based on his awareness that a self-critical organization would gain more prestige and influence than one which tried to ignore or cover up its mistakes, difficulties and dilemmas.

Unfortunately, that structure was dismantled quite quickly in the years after Mr. Guterres and I left the organization. The current evaluation unit does not have a role in policy development and has developed a more technical and quantitative methodology in its assessment of UNHCR operations than employed in the days of PDES, which adopted a storytelling approach which we described as ‘the systematic use of anecdotal evidence’. The current unit does not provide input for the High Commissioner’s statements and speeches and has lost the role of acting as a focal point for relations with institute and individuals who are undertaking a critical analysis of refugee-related issues outside of UNHCR.

The function of academic liaison has been assumed by a UNHCR-supported entity titled the Global Academic Interdisciplinary Network, which is specifically devoted to the implementation of the Global Compact on Refugees. Which begs the question as to whether it will also examine the constraints and limitations of the Global Compact. As UNHCR has already declared the Compact to be “a gamechanger” and “a new paradigm for refugee protection,” I fear that such critical analysis will not be forthcoming from the Network.

Given this potential vacuum, research-based advocacy organizations have an important role to play. They should, for example, endeavour to find out what policy initiatives are taking place or being considered by UNHCR, which section of the organization is responsible for formulating them, and what kind of consultation process – if any – has been established to gather the perspectives of external stakeholders.

NGOs, for example, played a very helpful role in the formulation of UNHCR’s 2009 policy on refugees in urban areas, providing evidence that allowed PDES to overcome the objections of some senior managers who felt that it was legitimate to confine refugees to camps and to prevent them from taking up residence in cities and towns. Advocates and activists should be looking for other opportunities of this type to influence UNHCR policy and practice.

Response to external scrutiny

As mentioned earlier in this paper, UNHCR can be quite sensitive to criticism from other actors, especially when it is made public and threatens to undermine the organization’s carefully crafted public relations and self-promotional activities.

In my experience, it is quite common for the organization to dismiss such external scrutiny, often on the basis that the organization’s critics do not have a detailed knowledge of the issue or situation on which they are advocating, that they do not have an adequate understanding of the way that UNHCR functions, or that they do not appreciate the work that UNHCR is doing on behalf of refugees and displaced people behind the scenes. It is for those reasons that UNHCR can be particularly sensitive when it comes to scrutiny from individuals and organizations that evidently do know what they are talking about!

Let me make four brief points on this matter for refugee advocates and activists. First, do not be surprised or discouraged if you do get a negative reaction to your work from UNHCR. That is not unusual.  Second, make sure that your advocacy is based on the most robust evidence possible, and that your criticisms are expressed in ways that are not excessively antagonistic. Third, it is often useful to prepare the ground for what you intend to report by briefing relevant UNHCR staff before going public and by taking account of their responses in the final version of your outputs.

Fourth, and I will come back to this issue later, UNHCR is not a monolithic organization, and so you can assume that your findings and recommendations will prove more acceptable to some parts of the agency than others, depending on their function, location or position in the organizational hierarchy. In that respect, do not be at all surprised if you get a mixed reaction to your work from different components of UNHCR.

UNHCR and its mandate

There is probably no other UN agency that talks as much about its mandate as UNHCR, and I have always struggled to understand exactly why that is the case. What I can say with some certainty is that UNHCR has something of a superiority complex in relation to other humanitarian organizations, and its supposedly unique mandate for the protection of refugees plays an important part in that syndrome.

UNHCR’s preoccupation with its mandate helps to explain the organization’s longstanding reservations with respect to the humanitarian coordination role played by OCHA, and its evident nervousness when IOM began to expand its activities to policy and protection issues that went beyond its traditional role in the transportation of refugees and other migrants. UNHCR’s preoccupation with its mandate is also reflected in the organization’s proprietorial approach to the people it works for, symbolized by the fact that UNHCR’s Twitter handle is not @unhcr, but @refugees.

UNHCR also has what might be described as a hegemonic approach to the refugee issue, a characteristic that can be seen in its attempt to co-opt those organizations that might challenge its dominant role in the refugee regime. That, in my opinion, is what has happened to ICVA, the International Council of Voluntary Agencies, which co-organizes the annual consultations between UNHCR and the NGO community, and which has become much less critical of UNHCR than it was in the past. I also have a strong suspicion that UNHCR will take a similar approach to the growing number of Refugee Led Organizations (RLOS), cultivating relationships with, and providing funding to, a small number of preferred RLOs that are prepared to play by the rules of the UN game.

With respect to its mandate, it is important to recognize that UNHCR has a consistent record of expansionism. Initially, that expansionism was expressed in primarily geographical terms, its sphere of operations expanding from Europe in the 1950s to Africa, Asia and Latin America in subsequent decades and eventually to the former Soviet bloc and to the Middle East.

It has also expanded in terms of the categories of people it works with, its sphere of interest steadily moving beyond refugees to include other ‘persons of concern’, including internally displaced people, stateless populations, asylum seekers, returnees, people in mixed migratory movements, so-called stranded migrants and people displaced in the context of climate change and environmental disasters.

Finally, UNHCR has expanded in terms of its functions. Starting in the 1950s as an organization predominantly staffed by lawyers, it has now developed a competence in an incredibly wide range of areas, including logistics, livelihoods, food security, development, community services, security, energy and the environment. I must confess that I was quite an enthusiastic expansionist when working for UNHCR. But I now have growing reservations about the breadth of the organization’s activities and in its chronic inability to fund them all.

At the same time, I am concerned by UNHCR’s apparent quest to boost its visibility and underline its importance by replacing the legally defined notion of ‘refugee’ with the less specific notions of ‘people forced to flee’ and ‘forcibly displaced people’.

in that respect, UNHCR appeared quite excited earlier this year to announce that there were now more than 100 million ‘forcibly displaced people’ around the world, an ‘unprecedented’ and ‘record’ number’ according to its social media output. But take a closer look at the statistics, and you will find that less than a third of that number are refugees who come under the direct mandate of UNHCR, that more than half of them are internally displaced people for which UNHCR does not have an exclusive mandate, and that more than five million of them, Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, are specifically excluded from UNHCR’s Statute.

Special initiatives

In my experience, UNHCR has a tendency to jump quite rapidly from one issue to another, according to what appears to be most relevant and even fashionable at the time. At one moment it might be urban refugees, the internally displaced or protracted refugee situations, and at another time statelessness, refugee education or climate change. In order to demonstrate its concern for and involvement in such issues, UNHCR has the habit of launching special initiatives, all of which have led the organization to accumulate a vast number of commitments, the implementation of which simply cannot be tracked, or their impact evaluated.

This problem has been exacerbated by the introduction, in the late 2000s, of an annual UNHCR meeting titled the High Commissioner’s Dialogue on Protection Challenges, each of them focusing on a different theme. This was a worthy attempt by High Commissioner Guterres to escape from the very stilted and unproductive ‘debates’ taking place in the Executive Committee. But it has proved difficult for the organization to establish concrete and sustainable plans of action on each of these issues.

For advocates and activists, this means that timing is very important. UNHCR is more likely to engage constructively with you if you are working on an issue that is at the top of their current organizational agenda, rather than one that was of prime interest to them at some point in the past. It also means that advocates have an important role to play in reminding UNHCR of the commitments it has made in the past and in asking whether they have actually been met in practice.

With respect to the Global Compact on Refugees, UNHCR has established a system whereby states and other stakeholders can make specific ‘pledges’ in relation to the Compact’s main goals, with regular reports being issued in terms of the number and types of pledge that have been made.

While this system provides UNHCR with a convenient means of demonstrating that the implementation of the Compact is making good progress, there is scope for advocates and activists to take a critical look at this system and to ask whether it provides an over-optimistic appraisal of the Compact’s impact. Using a different evaluation methodology, for example, the Danish Refugee Council has concluded that, “three years since the launch of the Global Compact on Refugees, the international community has yet to deliver on its promise to better share responsibility for refugees. Lack of political will and leadership is challenging the achievement of more equitable and predictable responses to forced displacement.”

UNHCR’s diversity

Like any organization with a huge number of employees, a complex organizational structure and a wide range of activities, UNHCR is a very diverse organization, quite unlike the monolith that some external commentators have assumed it to be. As a result, advocates and activists are unlikely to get consistent responses from the different individuals and entities with whom they interact in UNHCR.

As a result of this organizational diversity, external actors wishing to influence UNHCR need to develop an understanding of the different and sometimes conflicting perspectives that various components of the organization bring to their work. It also means that advocates and activists may well be regarded as potential allies – or even as potential opponents – in terms of the intense internal competition that takes place for visibility, influence and funding within UNHCR.

In the case of PDES, we pursued quite a systematic – and some would say cynical – strategy of cultivating relationships with external stakeholders who could support the work we were trying to do, including, especially, the NGO community. On the basis of this generally successful experience, it makes a great deal of sense for advocates and activists to pose not only as critics of UNHCR, but also as actors that can help the different entities within the organization to attain their objectives.

Meetings, meetings, meetings

Like the rest of the UN system, UNHCR loves to organize meetings, a problem that has undoubtedly been exacerbated by the Global Compact on Refugees.  As well as the more established gatherings of the Executive Committee, Standing Committee, Consultations on Resettlement, NGO Consultations and Dialogue on Protection Challenges, the organization now has a Global Refugee Forum, a High-Level Officials’ meeting relating to the implementation of the Compact, and meetings of Solidarity Mechanisms in response to specific emergencies.

While UNHCR has the ability to organize, service and participate in all of these different gatherings (not to mention those that take place at the regional and national level) most advocacy organizations and activists do not. Capacity issues aside, UNHCR’s state-centric nature and hegemonic tendencies mean that the organization prefers its meetings to be conducted in accordance with diplomatic protocol, dominated by prepared governmental statements and with relatively little scope for interactive discussion.

In relation to this issue, advocates and activists might wish to bear three points in mind. First and most obviously, think hard before devoting the time and resources required to participate in UNHCR meetings, especially when they involve international air travel and take place in high-cost locations such as Geneva or New York. How much difference will your presence and participation really make, and are there alternative advocacy strategies available that might prove to be more effective and efficient?

Second, advocates and activists should not expect to learn a great deal or to have a substantial impact by sitting for hours on end in the main UN conference chambers. In my experience, it is often a more efficient strategy to read the statements that governments, UN agencies and other stakeholders have made after the event, and to spend more time in smaller, more private and transparent discussions with the delegates and UNHCR staff who are present at the meeting.

Third, advocates and activists will always struggle to revolutionize the very cautious format and tone of UNHCR meetings. While pursuing that elusive objective, they should continue to push at the margins of what is deemed acceptable to states in the shorter term, especially in ensuring that Refugee-Led Organizations, civil society institutions and NGOs are properly represented in relevant gatherings.

Building lasting relationships

A final point of this paper is simply to underline the difficulty experienced by external stakeholders in building lasting relationships with UNHCR. The organization’s staff move rapidly from one assignment to another and are often redeployed from their regular posts to emergency operations. The organization is also engaged in an apparently interminable process of restructuring, making it difficult to keep up with exactly who is responsible for what within the organization.

Since I left UNHCR, for example, the agency has undertaken a major decentralization process, moving the Regional Bureaux to the field, so that decision-making takes place closer to the point of delivery. That development will almost certainly have some important implications for the way in which advocates and activists undertake their activities. In the experience of one large international NGO, decentralizing those Bureaux has actually made them more susceptible to pressures exerted by states in the regions where they are located. That is an outcome that refugee advocates and activists should resist.

Event this Thursday

To further learn about next steps after the Forum, join our roundtable discussion on Thursday Jan 30. We will share insights from the Global Refugee Forum and ideas on how to support refugee participation in all aspects of refugee research, policy and practice.

Speakers will include Mustafa Alio, a refugee advisor, was included as a formal member of the Canadian delegation, as well as Muzna Dureid, Syrian Refugee and Founder of Women Refugees Not Captives.

The event is free; and check out more details in the poster below.

Loren Landau, Richa Shivakoti, Susan McGrath, Roula El-Rifai, and James Milner, at IDRC Offices, 5 September 2019 

The goal of the initiative is to work with partners in major refugee-hosting regions of the global South, which hosts 80% of the world’s refugees, to develop a plan to support sustainable, localized research capacity to better influence discussions on refugee issues in local, national, regional and global contexts.

Phase one of the project (September 2019 to January 2020) will map regions in the global South most affected by recurring and protracted instances of large-scale forced migration and the research ecosystems in these regions. Supported by a global advisory network of actors active in different regions of the global South, this phase will include research on models for sustainable research ecosystems and the challenges faced by researchers in the global South.

Phase two of the project (January 2020 to July 2020) will include field visits to priority regions identified in the mapping phase. These field visits will examine models for sustainability and impact in specific local and regional contexts.

Discussion with partners, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University, 5 September 2019

The project responds to four recent trends:

• The broad realization of the importance of localized research in developing new responses to enduring challenges relating to refugees and forced migration in the global South;
• The emerging recognition of the complex links between fragility and forced migration, the nexus between humanitarian responses, development and peace, and the need for holistic and people-centered approaches that respond to the complex nuances of local contexts;
• The critical importance of an inter-disciplinary and multi-sectoral approach to thinking about solutions, including analysis of the local political and economic environment in which refugee self-reliance, solutions, and programming with host communities will be pursued;
• The recognized value of a design that connects all stages of the research process to policy and practice in an organic way by fostering and sustaining dialogue between the research, policy and practitioner communities, in local, regional and global contexts.

“” has become a central theme in development and humanitarian policy and practice, especially since the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016. The need to engage host communities, refugee communities, and national actors across the humanitarian and development fields is equally central to the (GCR), which was affirmed by the UN General Assembly in December 2018. The GCR is premised on the understanding that responses to refugees are best pursued in partnership with host communities and in response to local conditions, opportunities and interests.

Localized knowledge and sustained research capacity in regions of refugee origin is a vitally important foundation for such localized responses to displacement, yet it is critically under-supported and often lacking in capacity in key refugee-hosting regions. While 80% of the world’s refugees remain in their regions of origin in the global South, well over 80% of research on refugees and forced migration that influences global policy discussions originates from scholars and research centers in the global North. The concentration of research capacity in the global North perpetuates this trend, while support for research centres in refugee-hosting regions in the global South has largely been crisis-driven and unsustainable.

More localized research on refugee and forced migration issues can contribute to more effective policy and practice, especially given the complex dynamics of displacement in fragile contexts and the need to integrate refugee responses into local, national and regional development and peacebuilding strategies.

This question was the focus of an event hosted by IDRC on 26 September 2018, in collaboration with the Local Engagement Refugee Research Network (LERRN). Featuring presentations from Dulo Nyaoro (Kenya), Maha Shuayb (Lebanon) and Jeff Crisp (UK), the event highlighted the challenges faced by researchers based in regions of origin and the many benefits that arise from supporting their leadership in discussions on issues relating to policy and practice.

Maha Shuayb, James Milner and Dulo Nyaoro, IDRC event, 26 September 2018

The event highlighted how researchers in key refugee-hosting regions in the global South currently rely on sporadic, project-driven funding and typically play a subservient role to scholars from the global North in the production of knowledge on refugee issues.

In contrast, the event illustrated how vibrant and sustained local knowledge brokers and networks are critical if the goal of localization of refugee policy and practice is to be realized.

The outcomes of the event reinforced the growing concern in the field of refugee and forced migration studies that the lack of sustainable support to research capacity in regions of refugee origins poses ethical and practical challenges to the development of more effective and legitimate responses to protection and solutions for refugees.

In 2012, for example, Loren Landau from the University of the Witwatersrand, argued that the lack of autonomous and reliable support for research capacity in the global South entrenches asymmetrical power relations and inequalities that marginalizes knowledge and perspectives from the global South. In the absence of equitable and sustainable support for research capacity, Landau argued that South-North research networks become “”

A core objective of LERRN and its collaboration with IDRC is to learn from these lessons and help support sustainable research capacity in regions of refugee origin that can, in turn, generate and promote new approaches to protection and solutions with and for refugees.

For more information on this initiative, please contact: LERRN@carleton.ca