Lessons from the coordination of refugee responses

Abstract

The literature review found little evidence of successes in coordination of refugee responses involving multiple lead agencies. Rather, it identified some clear lessons to emerge from recent experience of refugee response coordination, in particular from the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon. While host governments are assigned primary responsibility for refugee responses in international law, they face many challenges and, in practice, it is aid agencies who lead these – often bypassing host state actors. The literature highlights the need to involve host states and stresses the importance of capacity building to support this.