Envisioning a policy convening space: Reflections on building the Refugee Policy Platform

By Saleh Abbas 

January 2022

The Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative (RSRI) created the Refugee Policy Platform to advance discussions around self-reliance policies. The policy platform falls under the RSRI’s advocacy pillar which, along with the programming and measurement pillars, works towards a world where refugees can fully enjoy their human rights. In this piece, we wanted to share the thoughts, struggles, and motivations that informed the creation of this platform.

We widely debated the best way to portray refugee policies

In considering the development of this platform, we thought about to whom and for whom we wanted this to be useful. This thought process guided the visual, content, and interactivity pieces that eventually made up the policy platform. Visually, we wanted this to be a cursory overview for practitioners, researchers, and policy beneficiaries to familiarize themselves with the policy framework of countries. The same thinking motivated us to include a ranking of policy “progressiveness” in the form of a color gradient to provide a comparative overview of policy between the countries based on the level of self-reliance across indicators. We designed the visual experience of the platform to enable readers to easily scan and review current refugee policies and pledges and connect them to relevant partner efforts.

When deciding on our scoring method, we wanted a straightforward method that tracks for the presence of de jure refugee policies as opposed to measuring the extent of policy implementation. Policies were categorized on a scale of 1 to 3 and corresponded to the presence of self-reliance policies along the six tracked indicators (Freedom of Movement, Right to Education, and so on). As a result, the Refugee Policy Score is calculated by summing up the scores from the six self-reliance indicators to reflect a de jure snapshot of refugee policies of a given country.

Tracking policies was remarkably elaborate, complex, and context-dependent

Tracking refugee policies was challenging! Depending on the country’s setting, different partners lead reporting on policy progress and shifts, and often coverage was run in parallel, was siloed, and resulted in duplication of work. The duplication of policy coverage often necessitated the sifting of additional reports that had nominal content updates in relation to the information tracked by our platform. We also noticed a recurrence of policy coverage across specific self-reliance indicators. For example, freedom of movement, the right to work, and the right to education were among the most covered. Other indicators, such as the right to housing and access to regularization, were underreported, making tracking their progress more difficult and, at times, impossible.

Adding another layer of complexity to policy tracking, we noted more fragmented policy coverage in countries without Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) engagement, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh. These countries would also be marked by minimal policy provisions for refugees and little policy progress over the years. Highlighting these gaps in policy coverage was another important piece that we wanted to bring to the forefront in the visual gradient of refugee policies.

Policy content was another piece we struggled with in the early research stages. Our initial brainstorming sessions focused on how much policy detail we wanted to include in our platform that given time and resources would only provide a cursory review of de jure policy environments. Ultimately, our platform was not meant to be the end destination to learn about policies and pledges, but rather a convening that reflects policy landscapes and links to organizations working towards identifying and understanding refugee policies from different perspectives.

With that in mind, we felt it was only natural to add the key connecting mechanism of our platform in the form of a policy resource hub that highlights additional policy resources. This resource hub was imagined after considering the multitude of useful policies, tools, and resources that could be consolidated. In our review, we found there was no singular space that hosted important work that could be visually tracked as well as convened for ease of access, comparison, and reference when trying to understand refugee policies across various populations and groups. Moving forward, we are excited to invite our community to share with us their feedback to expand the collaborative and practical capabilities of this section.

Where does this lead us?

Throughout this reflection, we touched on for whom we wanted this platform to be useful. However, at the heart of this project, our “for whom” were the refugee and displaced communities working to achieve dignified and self-reliant lives. When we set out on this exercise to map refugee policies, we did so not only as an academic exercise, but also to accountably spotlight the progress, or lack thereof, around refugee policies and pledges in hosting countries. As such, the platform is positioned as a live portal into self-reliance policies and will continue to regularly feature updates on self-reliance policies, pledges, and contributions from partners in the field.

In future renditions, we hope to provide more direct linkages between partners and their direct policy work in featured countries on the platform. While the policy platform did not cover policy implementation, we realize its importance in reflecting the daily experiences of refugees.

Additionally, we also noted that the presence of self-reliance policies alone (leading to higher policy scores) was not always indicative of a self-reliant environment for refugees. Therefore, policy scoring alone may not fully reflect the de facto realities of refugees, particularly when policy tracking does not engage civil society groups.

In that light, we invite you to look forward to an analysis of de facto refugee policies from the Center for Global Development and Asylum Access, set for release in early 2022.

Finally, we acknowledge the platform’s limitations in including few local actors and refugee voices. As the project evolves, the platform is poised to include perspectives from refugees and local organizers in a way that is helpful to them.

Saleh Abbas is a former consultant for the RSRI and was part of the team that developed the Self-Reliance Policy Platform.