Towards a temporal theory of refugee crisis response: ‘passing the baton’ across sectors

Abstract

This article explores partnering over and across time in refugee response situations where stakeholders, needs, beneficiaries, and the nature of the crisis change. It is based on interviews and fieldwork in various European settings from the 1990s to 2023. All of that work targeted different research questions related to the coordination of refugee assistance. For this study, all of these interviews were recoded with a focus on change over time. The findings indicate that the coordination of refugee assistance entails the significant aspect of ‘handing off’, as one set of stakeholders cedes its efforts to the next. Duties and responses flow from informal, unorganised volunteers, to local emergency relief players and international non-governmental organisations, and eventually to longer-term local, municipal, or state entities. The article presents an important dimension of cross-sectoral coordination, but not at a single point in time, or multiple points of interaction, suggesting a general flow from one set of players to the next.