By Çağla Ekin Güner and Ana Margheritis.
Two of the most dramatic human displacements in history have taken place in the Middle East and Latin America in the past decade. The civil war in Syria forced millions of people to flee during and after 2011, mainly to Turkey. Excluded from formal refugee status due to Turkey’s geographical limitation to the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees, Syrians were placed under temporary protection. This regime exacerbated their legal and socio-economic precarity and posed mounting challenges for settlement and integration policies. In Venezuela, the deterioration of political, economic and social standards in the early 2000s prompted significant outflows, which have intensified since 2016. When the lack of security and basic services spread throughout the country, emigration massively increased, and the type of flows and destinations diversified. As analysed elsewhere, such large displacement has affected most Latin American countries and, at its peak (2017/2018), has demanded a regional response.
In our project, we have offered two examples of the crucial role played by international organizations (IOs) in the public-private collaborations that have been launched to address the impact of these migration crises. We emphasize the significance of the protracted character of the problem, which highlights its complexity, temporality and scope for policy innovation.
The displacement of Syrians since 2011 has become a central area of tension in Turkey’s political and societal discourse, exposing the limits of centralized migration governance in addressing long-term integration needs. In this context, local governments have emerged as key actors, particularly in cities like Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city and a critical hub for both transit and settlement of Syrians. By examining how local authorities, in collaboration with IOs, have navigated restrictive national frameworks and experimented with institutional innovations in refugee inclusion, our work identifies three main developments.
First, municipal actors increasingly redefined refugees’ access to rights and services beyond restrictive national frameworks. The establishment of the Directorate of Urban Justice and Equality (DUJE) in Izmir in 2020 exemplifies how city governments can introduce inclusive, rights-based approaches underpinned by intersectionality and urban citizenship.
Second, mayoral leadership was crucial in driving institutional change. Izmir’s intra-party transition in 2019 triggered a shift in political priorities, enabling the foundation of DUJE as a municipal unit to reframe access to services for all residents of the city, including refugees.
Third, the UNHCR played a crucial role in supporting and legitimizing DUJE. Together with the municipality, it developed a dedicated refugee branch within the directorate, an innovative example of vertical cooperation between an international organization and a local authority. This partnership provided resources, strengthened capacity and offered a political shield in a highly polarized national context. Though limited by administrative and financial constraints, DUJE grounded a broader vision of urban citizenship in which participation and recognition transcended legal status. It also reflected UNHCR’s shift from displacement-focused assistance towards long-term inclusion and social cohesion. While UNHCR initially proposed a refugee-specific unit, negotiations led to the creation of a broader rights-based directorate, signalling its growing engagement with local governance and inclusive urban policy.
Such experiments remain fragile, however. After the 2024 local elections and another mayoral change, DUJE underwent a restructuring process, casting doubt on the continuity of its inclusive agenda. The case of Izmir thus highlights both the potential of municipal-IO collaboration to advance refugee rights in the context of protracted crisis conditions and the political volatility surrounding such innovations.
In Latin America, the nature and magnitude of the unprecedented intra-regional displacement of Venezuelans tested the capacity of transit and receiving countries, as well as relatively low-institutionalized and ineffective regional organizations. Inter-state multilateralism faded and was rapidly replaced by ad hoc unilateral measures. A regional approach only emerged in 2018 when the UNHCR and IOM (International Organization for Migration) launched a co-led transnational initiative: the Regional Inter-Agency Coordination Platform (R4V), which today involves around 250 intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, international donors, and national and local governments in 17 Latin America and Caribbean countries. Our work underscores three main implications of this partnership.
First, the R4V constitutes a unique intervention in terms of its large number of partners and geographical scope, intense use of virtual tools and platforms, and formal co-leadership. The nature of the problem encouraged innovation. The Venezuelan case involves mixed flows, continuous outflows, return, circularity, relocation across several countries, and a political controversy around the status of refugees; it affects the entire region, rather than a few countries around the epicentre of the crisis. Therefore, IOs found an opportunity for redesigning old models of humanitarian responses while expanding actions geographically and substantially.
Second, although initially conceived as a coordination role, IOs’ intervention diversified and evolved as the crisis worsened. By facilitating information diffusion and negotiations, the R4V platform structured relations among and within nation-states, between these and non-governmental organizations, and between regional actors and international donors. Being the main source of updated migration data, the R4V increased the IOs’ influence on policymaking. Over time, the platform incorporated new members, channelled inter-sectoral collaborations across multiple policy domains, increased its advocacy and fundraising capacity, extended the timeframe of its strategic goals, and reframed the crisis narrative to include not only Venezuelans but also other nationalities sharing migration corridors across South, Central and North America.
Third, although the transnational partnership is portrayed as a technical, apolitical coordination-focused intervention, complementary to states’ actions, it engages with substantive aspects of migration governance, including aligning the region with the global emphasis on safe, orderly and regular migration. Representatives of the leading IOs portrayed the R4V as an effective response with benefits to all parties – a view that helps justify a continuous region-wide approach under IOs’ leadership. In the meantime, the platform has fostered a new intersectoral and multilevel management of regional migration.
These cases illustrate how IOs can play innovative roles during protracted crises, which not only place great strain on institutions but also create opportunities to reconfigure governance mechanisms. As shown here, IOs may shape new institutional arrangements, whether by enabling regional frameworks for multi-country cooperation or supporting local governments to innovate under political and administrative constraints. In both cases, navigating politically charged environments has required pragmatic strategies and pro-active adaptations that ultimately reshaped migration governance. That said, the results ultimately depend on sustained political will, multi-scalar collaboration and embedded institutional support.