Building Meaningful Refugee Participation into Protection Policymaking
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Highlights
Refugee participation in protection policymaking remains largely tokenistic; genuine co-design, clear theories of change, and real policy influence are urgent.
- Most refugee participation in policymaking is consultative and symbolic, giving refugees little actual influence over policies that affect them, despite growing global commitments to do so since 2016.
- Lack of meaningful refugee input leads to poorly designed policies; the 2016 Jordan Compact's job zones saw low uptake partly because refugees were not consulted during design.
- Three participation models—consultative, advisory, and professional—each offer potential pathways toward genuine co-design and shared ownership of protection policymaking.
- States and UNHCR should promote diverse, funded, and skills-supported participation, and use the 2023 Global Refugee Forum as a test case with transparent accountability measures.
Around the world, many refugees find themselves in situations of protracted displacement. As states and international actors search for more effective ways to address protection and displacement challenges, one promising—but often underutilized—approach is to meaningfully involve refugees in crafting and implementing policy responses.
Engaging affected communities in protection policymaking can take a variety of forms, including one-off consultations, individual refugee advisors or advisory boards, and refugees being appointed as senior leaders or hired as staff within organizations. Such approaches hold the potential to foster policies that better reflect the needs and priorities of refugee communities and, in doing so, improve protection outcomes. But care must be taken to go beyond tokenistic and inconsistent engagement, and more evidence is needed to understand which approaches are most impactful and under what circumstances.
This report—part of the Beyond Territorial Asylum: Making Protection Work in a Bordered World initiative led by MPI and the Robert Bosch Stiftung—explores what motivates states, international organizations, and other actors to implement refugee participation initiatives, what forms these initiatives take, and what their limitations are. The study also proposes a preliminary theory of change (how such activities are intended to achieve their goals), a set of indicators to measure the influence of refugee participation on policy effectiveness, and recommendations for how such tools can be leveraged to improve refugee engagement and protection policies.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 Motivations for Meaningful Refugee Participation
3 Models of Participation
A. The Consultative Model
B. The Advisory Model
C. The Professional Model
4 Factors that Shape Refugees’ Ability to Influence Policy
A. Political Space for Participation
B. Selection of Participants
C. Resources
5 Evaluating Refugee Participation
6 Conclusion and Recommendations for Navigating Trade-Offs and Moving Beyond Participation
About the Global Program
The Global Program bridges policy advice, research, and candid dialogue to design effective migration policies, drawing on global evidence and anticipating the forces reshaping how people move.
About the Beyond Territorial Asylum Initiative
This MPI-Robert Bosch Stiftung initiative explores innovative approaches to asylum and refugee protection amid growing global pressures.
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