Municipal authorities often play a vital role to displaced populations in acute and chronic crises as key first providers of support and services. This role was recognised by the World Humanitarian Summit (2016) which set out a ‘localisation’ agenda with an aim to direct greater attention and financing to municipalities. Yet, these local bodies frequently have only a limited presence in urban informal neighbourhoods, which house tens of millions of forcibly displaced people globally. At the same time, alternative (armed) non- and semi-state actors may play significant roles in everyday neighbourhood governance, to challenge the state’s claim to urban sovereignty and complicate humanitarian and development programming.
Challenges of legitimacy and authority
Since the mid-2000s, Western donors have shown greater recognition that local non-state actors seek to impose collectively binding rules on populations living within their territories. As these claims to authority may challenge those of the state, non-state actors aim to secure some level of approval from residents for their governing initiatives. Donors thus have adopted sophisticated political economy analytics to understand actual empirical practices of ‘legitimacy-making’. This entailed an important shift from narrowly preconceived normative notions of legitimacy as being about ‘good governance’, free elections, etcetera.
Against this backdrop, we undertook a qualitative study aiming to better understand how, why and to what effect Western donors (including US, UK, France and the EU) conceive of and seek to address the legitimacy of state and non-state public authority actors in their responses to urban displacement. This was part of the Public Authority and Legitimacy Making (PALM) research project originally supported by the Dutch social science research council NWO-WOTRO with additional support from the FCDO Better Assistance in Crises (BASIC) programme.
The study focused on the strategic, policy and programmatic donor response to the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan and Lebanon. Here, in a quest for low-cost housing, many refugees have moved into the poorest, most densely populated and worst serviced urban areas. The outfall of the Covid-19 pandemic, currency depreciation, price spikes, economic collapse and subsidy removals accelerated these trends. Nevertheless, our research finds that both countries’ governments lack a national urban policy, have weak city planning capacities, and severely constrain municipal service provisioning to informal settlements and urbanised Palestinian camps, which are by and large deemed undesirable. Consequently, alternative actors have emerged to directly provide or broker access to limited basic services provided by the state, including faith-based political parties and associated charities, tribal kinship networks, Palestinian Committees and factions, faith-based charities and others. Some of these provide social assistance, including to disabled people and the destitute, and engage in conflict resolution, however the extent to which this happens across nationalities and social and religious identities is unclear, and subject to ongoing research.
Key findings
The findings of the study, analysing Western donor approaches to contested public authority and legitimacy in urban displacement responses in Jordan and Lebanon, are now published in an open access article in Global Policy. Here are the top three takeaways:
- Donors have put significant effort in understanding local contestations for public authority. They use this analysis to support, shift, work around, blank, or ban existing legitimacy-making practices. Firstly, and unsurprisingly, municipalities are the preferred local governance actor. Donors funded national municipal support programmes with tens of millions of United States dollars, including the Lebanon Host Communities Support Programme (LHSP), the Cities Implementing Transparent, Innovative and Effective Solutions (CITIES) and the Municipal Services and Social Resilience Programme (MSSRP) in Jordan. Nearly every document reviewed mentioned municipalities, while donor interviews discussed municipal legitimacy in much greater detail than any other actors.
- Donors hold three common assumptions that link municipal capacities and resident participation to municipal legitimacy and that connect the latter, in turn, to social stability. Firstly, donors commonly assume that improving the capacity of municipalities to provide services will increase municipal legitimacy, even though commissioned research and international studies challenge the validity of that argument. Insecurity and competition over jobs, rather than access to services, could be the main source of tension between locals and refugees in Lebanon, while in Jordan, most citizens cannot distinguish the level of government from which they receive services. Secondly, donors assume that more participatory municipal governance will improve municipal legitimacy. Consequently, donors encouraged municipalities to consult with a broad base of constituents, rather than a narrow group of local elites (Lebanon) or tribal interests (Jordan) for the selection of donor funded projects. A third donor assumption is that improved municipal legitimacy will increase social stability and reduce host-refugee tensions.
- What about semi/non-state public authority actors? Donors largely avoid tribal networks, deeming them arcane, exclusionary to women, Palestinians and Syrians, and harmful to donor interests. Political parties are only occasionally mentioned in funded projects on host-refugee relations or local politics in Jordan. In contrast, Lebanese political parties are frequently discussed, as ‘sectarian parties’, however project proposals, Theories of Change or country strategy documents do not link these to host-refugee tensions. Moreover, donors used coded language to avoid identifying those parties by name or chose not to explicitly describe their engagement with non-state/semi-state actors exercising public authority, yet allowed implementing partners to work with them. Hence, donors generally projected a neutral posture to enable operations. However, there is one significant exception: the proscription of Hezbollah, which is elected into office and controls large parts of Beirut’s southern informal suburbs. This prevents the institutionalising of Hezbollah run services into municipalities or central ministries and, with Hezbollah’s ability to refuse Western-funded projects permission to operate in its territories, means that some severely deprived communities and neighbourhoods are not receiving aid or are outside assessment of their needs. The wholesale proscription of such public authority actors expresses the persistent power of normative notions of legitimacy, and arguably is at tension with humanitarian principles, impedes aid to vulnerable displaced populations, and may contradict donor development objectives.
To conclude: by analysing the ways in which donors conceive of and engage public authority actors in Jordan and Lebanon, we have brought analyses of protracted displacement dynamics into conversation with hybrid governance debates to find that each can deepen insight into the other. This is because over time, protractedly displaced populations end up living side-by-side with the local poor in densely populated urban neighbourhoods. Here, conditions of historic neglect and criminalisation not only lead to substandard municipal services and living environments but also foster alternative forms of social and political order involving (armed) actors asserting public authority over resident populations. Yet, surprisingly little is known about the means, types, and logics of governance by local public authority actors regarding refugees of different nationalities, locals or migrant workers. Consequently, our current research for BASIC seeks to analyse the role of public authority actors in Lebanon in social assistance and welfare provisioning towards mixed residential populations. It is hoped that this will provide new insights into not just how claims to authority are underwritten, but also may affect people’s ability to survive protracted displacement.
