State of the Syria Crisis Response: Assessing Humanitarian and Development Challenges

For a comprehensive review of the response, Voluntas Advisory addressed practitioners from international organizations, NGOs, government authorities, donors, the private sector and academia, covering the cross section of the refugee and host community response from workers on the ground in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey to key decision makers.

Overall findings show that there is widespread disillusionment among the practitioners with both the situation and the response:

• Overall perceived performance of the Syria response is on the decline in particular of national authorities and local NGOs. One of the key drivers of the performance perception is meaningfulness: The more the respondents feel that the work his/her organization resonates with their own personal values, the more positive the respondent views the response performance.
• The greatest challenge to the Syria response is the lack of inclusion of affected people in decision-making. The Grand Bargain Commitments seeks to address this particular issue, but the impact on the ground appears to be limited.
• Despite the efforts to improve responses through the Grand Bargain and also the work to develop the Refugee Compact and Migration Compact, practitioners are not optimistic that the situation on the ground and the response will improve in the future.