The Syrian refugee crisis remains the world’s most compelling humanitarian challenge over a decade after it began, even as the emerging Gaza refugee crisis is urgent and pressing. With nearly 5.6 million refugees registered through the UNHCR across the region as of late 2023, the Syrian crisis has highlighted failures of state governance. Moreover, it has encouraged ad hoc and negotiated working networks of transnational and local groups. most notably the Jordan Compact and the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan (3RP). Such arrangements represent efforts at providing innovative governance to stateless people in areas that, if stable, are only partially managed by state authority. This paper looks at existing and emerging refugee governance regimes in the MENA in terms of the panel’s broader themes of Specifically, through focused analysis of the experience and evolution of Syrian refugee governance in Jordan, with some reference to Lebanon and Turkey, as well as to UNWRA and Gaza, I consider the following: (1) What lessons of possible relevance to alternative sovereignty does mixed NGO-state-private sector governance in refugee camps provide about authority and governance where state control is minimal or liminal? (2) How important has refugees’ own political agency been, when they have little or no citizenship rights in the areas in which they live? (3) What do the failures of refugee governance suggest more broadly for alternative sovereignties in the MENA, and particularly regional order? I address these questions using previous work and writing I have done on governance and the refugee crisis, as well as the parallels for challenges to and limitations of state sovereignty in the MENA with respect to the large numbers of non-citizen migrants in Arab Gulf societies. I argue that failures of governance and meeting services for large numbers of non-citizen migrants and refugees both illustrates and accelerates the contemporary empirical failures of MENA states and the need for alternative ideas around politics, especially enhanced regionalism. More specifically, regional regimes offer modest hope for improving the suboptimal record of both MENA states and the global order on challenging governance issues that span multiple societies. This paper builds on my training as a lawyer, political scientist and policy scholar. It advances my prior work, and nearly $1.1 million in funding, on legal contestation in five Arab countries, and a pilot grant to develop a global group of scholars to compare and refine regional approaches to refugee governance.