Toward a Theory of Cross-Sectoral Crisis Response Over Time: Ukrainian Refugee Assistance

• In Event: NGOS in Refugee Integration and Services

Abstract

Cross-sectoral coordination studies tend to focus on a particular time period, exploring cooperation or coordination in a setting during a fixed time period. This work explores coordination over time as informal volunteers in the immediate wake of the crisis, are replaced by international NGOs some days or weeks later, eventually ceding to local municipal governments or federal institutions.

This was a prominent theme during the European Refugee crisis of 2014. It repeats again over the past nearly two years with the Ukrainian Refugees pouring into neighboring countries. While intuitive, the literature has not defined this to date, nor has it explored coordination of refugee assistance in terms of ‘handing off’ the proverbial 'baton' as one set of stakeholders cedes their efforts to the next set.

Borton and Collinson (2017) described the initial explosion of NGO activity in the European Refugee Crisis (see also Francart and Borton, 2016; Kornberger et al. 2018). Others characterized the massive number of informal volunteers often found in refugee settings (Kaltenbrunner and Reichel, 2018; Twigg and Mosel, 2017). And Ansell et al (2010) and Garkisch et al. 2017) wrote about the management skills required to coordinate across myriad stakeholders. Additionally, a large body of work addressed refugee coordination specifically focused on cross-sectoral work (Garcia-Zamor, 2017; Hesse et al 2019, Meyer and Simsa 2018). However, these studies don’t capture the rapid change in stakeholder response from the initial onset of the crisis (often addressed informally) to the arrival of INGOs and the changes they bring to the situation, to the eventual handing over to local municipalities over time.

Having seen this process in several refugee settings and complex humanitarian emergencies (CHEs) this manuscript explores the development of a theory of crisis response across sectors, over time.

This work builds on roughly 50 interviews in Ukraine, Poland, and Romania in the summer of 2023, exploring how the response changed over the year and a half since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Interviews were conducted with informal volunteers, NGO representatives and public sector officials (and some representatives of firms) to explore how they viewed the response, when and why they engaged, and when and why they stopped, as task were ceded to other stakeholders.

Interviews suggested that initial volunteers grew tired over time and needed assistance; that INGOs arrived and established rules and procedures, and a burst of initial funding, but left quickly and did not fund local NGOs well enough for their work to carry on; and municipalities (schools, labor departments, transportation, housing) did not benefit from the experiences of those that helped prior. Moreover, the various stakeholders seemed to describe ‘sub-phases’ of the larger crisis as stakeholders and response needs changed. (We also explore one case where this flow from each stakeholder group to the next worked well, in contrast.)

This work has implications for organizational and interorganizational learning and management during crises. Lessons could be learned with (and within) each phase, but the needs and skill sets in each stage changed dramatically, preventing effective learning.

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Author

• Eric C Martin, Bucknell University