The War in Syria displaced over 5.5 million Syrians to neighbouring states and created unprecedented humanitarian need. However, only some international organizations (IOs) and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) made disruptive changes to their service delivery and rulemaking and addressed the unique, emerging health needs of Syrian refugees and migrants. The predominant expectations of scholars are that under severe time and security constraints, aid workers will have difficulty learning and changing their behaviors. We anticipate they will respond to new problems in a new context with the activities and strategies they used elsewhere or make only small adaptive changes to what they do. This paper examines moments when a few humanitarian organizations working amongst Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan bucked this trend and asks if existing theories of institutional change and organizational behavior can capture these moments. Based in 10-months of political ethnography and over 120 interviews with aid workers, I argue that organizations have more control over their response to external pressures than past studies indicate and existing theories capture, and that this obscures deliberate, fast-moving, and disruptive efforts by non-state actors to govern and exert power and influence over migrants in the Middle East. Building on theories of sociological institutionalism and responding to what Streeck and Thelen describe as a “conservative bias” toward gradualism in the literature, I show that actors inside of international organizations and below centralized headquarters can generate sufficient contestation surrounding humanitarian ‘need’ to trigger ruptures in the logics of global humanitarian institutions. I find that variation in aid worker capacities to trigger change is a function of organizational design.

International development cooperation, in particular German donor agencies, have supported Jordan to cope with the prolonged presence of around 670,000 Syrian refugees by establishing so-called Cash-for-Work (CfW) schemes. These public works programmes have recently been applied within the contexts of flight and forced migration as they not only deliver employment and income for vulnerable households as well as dearly needed public infrastructure. Rather, in addition to that, they are expected to unfold further positive effects for local communities, in terms of social cohesion, more equitable gender roles or local economic development. Yet, little scholarly attention has been paid so far at these “meso-level” effects at the scale of villages or neighbourhoods. The presented paper addresses this gap by applying a mixed-method approach, based on (i) 281 semi-structured interviews conducted in spring 2019 with CfW participants and non-participants at 9 CfW sites all over Jordan; (ii) 99 expert interviews at the local and national levels; and (iii) a quantitative census of all 1,847 participants in 2019 and 2020 in one specific CfW programme. Assessing the programmes’ effects on the different elements of social cohesion, we find that CfW indeed are able to strengthen the sense of belonging of Syrian refugees and native Jordanians of both genders as well as the horizontal trust between them. Furthermore, CfW contributes to women being more active members of society especially if CfW programmes explicitly target both genders and provide a work environment that is perceived as safe and suitable for women. CfW programmes affect vertical trust toward state institutions, however, in an ambiguous way because, in the absence of Jordanian authorities taking on complete ownership over the programmes, many Syrians and Jordanians attribute their positive effects to donor support rather than the commitment of local authorities. In sum, especially when factoring in community effects, CfW schemes in contexts of fragility and migration yield important results beyond providing social protection for individuals, but programme ownership and project design could yet be improved for more sustainable outcomes.

To systematically investigate Germany’s MENA policies and isolate its priorities from political, social, and economic realities in the target region, outlines the innovative core of this research project. The proposed paper focusses on a subfield of German foreign Policy - development cooperation - in the MENA region and its effectiveness in non-democratic rule with regard to mitigating migration. The 2013 coalition agreement of the German federal government assigns particular responsibility to manage migration to its Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and its implementing agencies. Particular attention is therefore drawn to the literature on the »migration hump« (Martin/Taylor 1993), as well as on the »migration-development nexus«. The latter concludes that policies designed to support development instead of migration generally fail, as they isolate root causes of forced migration from systemic deficiencies, global power and inequality (Castles/Miller 2009; King/Collyer 2016; IOM 2005; Nyberg-Sorensen et al. 2002). The purpose of this paper is to firs lay out the core reasons of forced migration that are immanent in authoritarian rule and then contrast them to the priorities of German development aid in the MENA between 2015 and 2020. The paper finds out that isolating root causes of forced migration from the logics of authoritarian rule, as dealt with in German development aid, will exacerbate the causes of people fleeing. Although this research focuses on Germany, both its research question and the methodology allows for transferrable implications and insights into other cases.

What explains variation in allocation of services for refugees at the local level? What are the drivers of municipal accommodation towards refugees? The literature provides various explanations for sub-national variation in responses to immigrants including but not limited to partisanship, local electoral competition, rentierism, and bureaucratic initiative. Using interview data and an original survey with a nationally representative sample of 264 municipal civil servants in Turkey, I provide evidence that larger the room for discretion municipal civil servants retain independent from the mayor, more likely that they provide for Syrian refugees. Contrary to the literature on bureaucratic incorporation however, I find that municipal accommodation does not always emanate from service providers' altruistic and professional motivations to serve persons in need. Through social assistance they provide, civil servants control and discipline refugees and render them invisible to the public eye, while safeguarding mayors’ electoral interest.