New Report Highlights Ways to Meaningfully Engage Refugees in Protection Policymaking

WASHINGTON, DC — Despite the growing focus on engaging refugees to ensure their unique knowledge and perspectives are considered as pressing protection and displacement challenges are addressed, there is little evidence whether this participation is occurring in meaningful ways or resulting in effective policy design and implementation.

Global actors have engaged refugee voices since the 2000s, though the efforts have been uneven. Amid rising pressures on the protection regime, the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees acknowledged that meaningful refugee engagement represents a promising but underutilized component of addressing the pressing need for more effective policies.

A new Migration Policy Institute (MPI) report out today examines the opportunities that states, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and refugee-led organizations and networks have to sharpen their understanding of the goals of refugee participation, how to best reach them and how to remove barriers.

In Building Meaningful Refugee Participation into Protection Policymaking, researcher Uwezo Ramazani outlines existing refugee participation models, the mechanisms through which initiatives are expected to improve policies, their limitations and the factors that affect refugees’ ability to influence policymaking. He then proposes a preliminary theory of change and set of indicators that can be built upon and customized to foster more thoughtfully designed refugee participation initiatives and ensure that lessons can be learned and shared.

“Refugee engagement still needs a greater push to move away from symbolism and tokenism and to instead meaningfully involve refugee communities in policy decisions that affect them,” writes Ramazani, who has himself experienced displacement.

It is also essential to better assess the efficacy of refugee participation initiatives, the report notes. “As improved assessments produce more evidence in this area and practices evolve, a positive feedback loop can emerge—one in which better documentation of the benefits of meaningful participation incentivizes more participation opportunities, and the lessons learned make those opportunities even more meaningful and impactful,” the study finds.

The report highlights factors influencing refugees’ access to decision-making processes and the effectiveness of their engagement, including the willingness of states to engage with them, the legitimacy of selected participants, funding and training availability, and the inclusion of diverse perspectives.

Refugee engagement should move beyond participation in processes led by others to co-design and co-ownership of policymaking and programming, Ramazani argues. The 2023 Global Refugee Forum being convened in Geneva in December offers an opportunity for states, UNHCR and non-governmental actors to  actively implement these principles. GRF stakeholders can later assess how refugees’ contributions were incorporated at the gathering, share assessment results and propose concrete recommendations for the next global convening.

The report is part of the three-year Beyond Territorial Asylum: Making Protection Work in a Bordered World initiative undertaken by MPI and the Robert Bosch Stiftung. The initiative seeks to address challenges to asylum systems that are under immense pressure and seize the opportunity to explore and test new ways to facilitate access to protection that better support equity and result in more flexible, sustainable infrastructure.

Read the report here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/refugee-participation-policymaking.