Beyond consultation: towards meaningful participation of refugees

Research on forced displacement reveals a wide gap between policy processes and the people that such processes seek to assist. This paper proposes actionable recommendations on how to operationalize the concept of ‘meaningful refugee participation in decision-making processes that affect the lives of refugees.

A refugee, generally speaking, is a displaced person who has crossed national boundaries and who cannot or is unwilling to return home due to well-founded fear of persecution. Such a person may be called an asylum seeker until granted refugee status by the contracting state or the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) if they formally make a claim for asylum.

There is a need to go beyond tokenistic participation and to genuinely empower refugees to have influence over the design, implementation, and evaluation of refugee-focused programs. The contributions of refugees themselves must also be enhanced in ways that can help contribute to a paradigmatic shift in the global infrastructure of refugee governance.

1. INTRODUCTION

This reflection paper aims to improve the theorization of ‘meaningful refugee participation’ as envisaged by the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees (GCR). 1 It takes the GCR as a very important international consensus document, or a non-binding UN declaration, for policy and practice-oriented conceptualization of meaningful participation by refugees in decision-making processes that affect their lives.2 Taking these observations as key departure points, the paper analyses the direct experiences and reflections of refugee advocates and refugee-led organizations (RLOs) on all matters relating to meaningful refugee participation. Building on scholarly debates about meaningful participation by refugees and narrative studies, it focuses specifically on how refugees themselves define such processes. It acknowledges the depth of the layered experiences of refugees, taking account of these levels of participation in the narrative approach. It concludes by proposing actionable recommendations for reform of the global infrastructure of refugee governance.

2. Conceptual approach

Definitions differ to some extent, but this paper adopts a conceptual framework for ‘meaningful participation’ that was originally articulated by the Global Refugee-Led Network (GRN) in the context of its involvement in the 2019 Global Refugee Forum (GRF). For the GRN, meaningful refugee participation is a process that enables refugees, regardless of their ‘location, legal recognition, gender, identity, and demographics, to take part:

… in fora and processes where strategies are being developed and/or decisions are being made (including at local, national, regional, and global levels, and especially when they facilitate interactions with host states, donors, or other influential bodies), in a manner that is ethical, sustained, safe, and supported financially.

The GRN’s theorization resonates with similar working definitions of ‘meaningful participation that have been in use in recent years by leading international NGOs, such as Oxfam.4 This can be seen as part of an emerging global consensus that refugee-related processes can be improved by strengthening the voice and self-representation of refugees in the design, implementation, and evaluation of programs. It also forms a key component of the Refugee Participation Pledge, a multi-stakeholder coalition galvanized by the GRN in the context of the 2019 GRF.5 However, there is little evidence on what kind of tools work best, and the work and contribution of RLOs remain poorly understood. This points to a need for more research to help guide developing practice in this area, and this kind of research is best done based on the lived experience of refugees and by refugees themselves.