Research

Conflict and Fragility

Reports and papers

Leveraging funds & political capital in Lebanon’s refugee crisis

30 Jul 2018 - 08:58
Source: Flickr/UNHCR/S. Baldwin

Is there protection in the region? Leveraging funds and political capital in Lebanon’s refugee crisis

This report analyses the challenges of implementing a ´protection in the region´ agenda in Lebanon, a country that hosts the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, and which has been the recipient of one of the largest per capita aid and support packages since 2016. Our main finding is that EU diplomatic efforts and financial commitments to date have made very limited progress in ensuring protection for Syrian refugees in the country or improving their dismal socio-economic position. On the contrary, the main socio-economic indicators for Syrian refugees have remained very poor for the past three years, and the refugees’ continued presence in the country is increasingly questioned by parts of Lebanon’s political establishment.

This report traces the reasons why donor efforts have had such limited success: restrictions created by Lebanese and European political narratives of displacement; the limitations imposed by Lebanon’s clientilistic economy; and the challenges of combining protection in the region with an economic reform agenda. Many donors have opted for predominantly technical approaches, based on cooperation with line ministries and state institutions. In our view, these approaches pay insufficient heed to the complex web of sectarian and personal interests that fuel Lebanese policy-making, with the result that limited progress is achieved for refugees.

This report is part of the series of publications capturing the outcomes of research conducted under the Surviving2Thriving project, funded by the Nationale Postcode Loterij. Within this project the Clingendael Institute looked at the protection in the region agenda in Lebanon in order to identify approaches that could be implemented by the key stakeholders: donors, aid agencies and national actors – in order to improve the quality of asylum in the country.