After multiple refugee local initiatives and conferences in the West Bank and Gaza in the mid 1990s, the PLO Department for Refugee Affairs established the Popular Service Committees (PSCs). PSCs were to play a liaison role between the camp communities and the United Nations Work and Relief Agency (UNRWA). Though the PSCs main goal is to facilitate and coordinate UNRWA services, they also play various local and national political roles with respect to UNRWA. The nature of interaction between both bodies reflects the socio-political particularity of each community/camp, the forms of services provided by UNRWA, and political transformations in the West Bank and Gaza. Formal and informal interactions between PSCs and UNRWA are marked by episodes of contention and cooperation as both sides negotiate and juggle the varying interests and visions at stake. In this regard, it is precisely this site where diverse forces –local community pressure, PLO, PA, and international humanitarian bureaucratic bodies – collide. Negotiations between both parties takes place on multiple organizational levels, from the low ranking UNRWA bureaucracy, all the way up to policy makers, and covering all areas of UNRWA services and programmes. This interaction sheds light on the multiple visions of “development”, “services”, and “rights”, and the respective paradigms they emerge from. This paper explores the relationship between UNRWA and PSCs based upon ethnographic research in the Bethlehem region and its refugee camps, (Deheisheh, Aida, and Beit Jibrin.) It focuses on the PSC practice of “defense” of local community rights and the tactic of putting demands on UNRWA. It will historicize, theorize, and ethnographically test the forms of ongoing cooperation and contention in this relationship. It will also contextualize this relationship within the socio-political transformations of the past 10 years, while investigating the political-cultural logic that governs it.