Jeremy Konyndyk is the President of Refugees International. In this conversation with Lars Peter Nissen he discusses how we can reform the humanitarian sector and how far we have come.

Lars Peter Nissen (1:00-2:18)

This week's guest on Trumanitarian is Jeremy Konyndyk. Jeremy has held a range of different roles in the humanitarian sector, from field worker to leading one of the biggest donor agencies in the sector, working on humanitarian reform in a think tank, and today he is the president of Refugees International. Now, as the saying goes, where you stand depends on where you sit. And Jeremy has sat in a lot of different chairs, but what has always struck me about him whenever I have engaged with him throughout his career is that it's the same person you meet no matter where he sits. It's a smart, honest humanitarian. I think that came through very clearly when we sat down for this conversation. Jeremy was open, he's smart, he has a range of experience that makes his perspective really interesting. I deeply enjoyed having the conversation with Jeremy, and I'm sure you will as well.As always, we deeply appreciate it when you make noise on social media about Trumanitarian, and why don't you forward it to your mom, to colleagues, to whoever you think might be interested in this show, but most importantly, as always, enjoy the conversation. Jeremy Konyndyk, welcome to Trumanitarian.

[Jeremy Konyndyk] (2:18 - 2:19)

My pleasure, thanks so much.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (2:19 - 2:26)

You're the president of Refugees International, and maybe let's start with that. What kind of an organization is that?

[Jeremy Konyndyk] (2:27 - 3:55)

Refugees International is an advocacy organization that fights for the rights and the well-being of refugees and other forcibly displaced people around the world. We focus on a range of different humanitarian crises, primarily refugee and IDP crises, but sometimes verging into other humanitarian emergencies as well. We try to focus on the policy disconnects within the humanitarian system. Many of the challenges in the humanitarian world are not things that can be solved by aid alone. In fact, the origin story of Refugees International was that our founder, Sue Morton, was working on the Thai-Cambodia border in the late 70s, during the Killingfields era in Cambodia, and witnessed pushbacks by Thai border police of Cambodians back into the Killingfields, and realized in that experience that there is not an aid solution to that. There's only an advocacy solution to that. What was happening could not be solved by more aid funding. It had to be addressed by fighting for the rights and raising awareness of that situation, fighting for the rights of the people whose rights were being violated. Out of that recognition grew, ultimately, Refugees International. Today, we apply that kind of a lens to crises worldwide.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (3:56 - 4:07)

You're here in Geneva for the Global Refugee Forum, which takes place this weekend. First of all, thank you for taking time out of what must be an incredibly busy schedule in a really hectic situation.

[Jeremy Konyndyk] (4:08 - 4:09)

My pleasure. It's great to be here.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (4:10 - 4:27)

I first met you when you were the administrator of OFDA, the Office for Disaster Assistance, as it used to be called during the Obama administration. And then, I believe you took a break from the US government during the following Trump administration?

[Jeremy Konyndyk] (4:27 - 4:33)

Well, not a voluntary one. I was a political appointee, and so we all turn over at the end of an administration.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (4:33 - 5:05)

And in that space between the two, because you went back into the US government afterwards, you did some really interesting work with the Global Center for Development on humanitarian reform. And actually, you did a podcast with Heba Ali from the New Humanitarian, where you went through the findings of the work that you and Patrick Saez and Rose Worden did. And I found that really interesting work, and that's where I'd like to start our conversation today.

[Jeremy Konyndyk] (5:06 - 5:06)

That sounds great.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (5:06 - 5:41)

So basically, your argument was back then that the past reform agendas, so if you go back, humanitarian reform, transformative agenda, so on, that they had failed because they did not tackle the underlying architecture. And you outlined four changes that you wanted to see in order to tackle this underlying issue and have real change. And the first one was to move to a people-driven response. So maybe first explain what is that about?

[Jeremy Konyndyk] (5:42 - 7:26)

[Lars Peter Nissen] (7:26 - 7:51)

Yeah. And some of those ideas were around adopting an independent accountability mechanism, area-based frontline coordination, remaking the financial business model, and adapting the sectors governance. Those were the four big headlines you had. And when you look at it today, one, do you think we made a dent in it? Are we moving forward? Are we moving backwards? And did you go far enough with those four suggestions?

[Jeremy Konyndyk] (7:52 - 8:52)

Did I go far enough? I think in retrospect, we probably could have gone further. But with that said, we were trying to put some things on the table that were tractable, that the system could meaningfully take up. So this wasn't proposing a kind of blank slate, how would you design the system from scratch? Because that's not how change happens. The way change happens is starting from where the system is now. And so we proposed those. And I think the most important of those was probably the independence piece. Because what we were seeing was that there were some interesting models for what was generally termed accountability to affected people. And almost all of those were housed within the organization that was being reviewed. And so there's a power dynamic there that is really out of whack.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (8:53 - 9:13)

Yeah, totally. For me, the question is always, would you invest your pension money in a company based on what that company says about itself? No, you wouldn't, because then your money would be in WeWork, and you would be broke. And so why is it that we are supposed to be able to hold ourselves to account? It doesn't make sense.

Well, I think a lot of the power dynamics within the humanitarian system relate to who is allowed or who is kind of positioned to be an intermediary between the entities that fund the system, so the kind of donors like the donor I used to lead, and the people who are nominally the reason the system exists, the recipients of aid on the front line. And all of the large UN organizations, all of the large NGOs, they operate as an intermediary and they are able to do that because of financing. They are an intermediary financing layer, which means that they can be an intermediary in a lot of other ways as well, an information intermediary.

Yeah. No, I couldn't agree more. And I have to admit, obviously having worked with ACAPs for the past 13 years, what we try to do is be some kind of independent voice at the front end, how do we frame this problem. And especially in the early years, it was very, very, very difficult to actually get that to be a legitimate idea. There was a lot of resistance from the system and the donors were not necessarily in our corner. Why do you think donors don't leverage this strategy more?

Well, one of the things that's interesting about being a donor is how much of the decision making is based on relationships. And I don't mean that in the sense of anything kind of corrupt or inappropriate. It's just kind of how humans relate to each other, right? And so if you're a donor, my experience, just as an existing human of being a donor, was the main other humans that I dealt with. And therefore, the main other humans who were shaping my view of the decisions I needed to make were from our intermediary partners. And I had and have great appreciation and respect for them. But the people who would then be in my ear day in, day out, were from major NGO partners, from OCHA, from big UN agencies, from other donors. And if I heard 110th or 120th as much direct input from local partners or aid recipients as I heard from them, I'd be surprised. It was probably far less. And that's just kind of when the donors get together. I mean, and this week right now that we're having here in Geneva with the Global Refugee Forum is an interesting case of this. Four years ago when they did the first Global Refugee Forum, there were hardly any refugee-led organizations there. There are more this year, but they're still vastly outnumbered in terms of their participation by the rest of the international architecture. And so I think that that is just kind of baked into how the system functions. And when you're a donor, you also kind of don't want to appear to be questioning or second-guessing or mistrusting those established partners that you have. And so I think there is a kind of resistance, but there's also just kind of a momentum or an impetus that you keep hearing from the same people you've always heard from.

Yeah, I totally get that, and I think I agree with you. We're not talking corruption here, but there's a heavy bias towards the incumbents.

Yes, that's right.

And so it's no surprise that change doesn't happen, especially if it's not in the interest of the incumbents.

Well, and that was a really core sort of premise of our research at CGD, was that the incentives for change didn't necessarily serve the kind of best material interests of most of the players in the system, right? So the donors like having an intermediary or a set kind of an intermediary system to which they can write very large checks, because they have to. And I think one underappreciated dimension to all this is how much donor budgets have grown relative to donor staff. And so as your budget grows and your staff doesn't, that means you need to just keep writing bigger and bigger checks and deferring more and more of the direct engagement and oversight to the intermediary partners. And so it serves the donors, but it also is kind of, it's necessary. The donors don't really have great other options.

And so they have to keep writing, kind of sending ever larger amounts of money to this system. And then, of course, the organizations whose budgets have grown dramatically don't have a really strong incentive to change that either.

Yeah, I was going to bring it up, but I was going to first ask all ACAPS donors who may be listening to us to please switch off right now. Because I think one of the biases we have when we talk about humanitarian reform is that donor capacity is almost never spoken about. And it's very clear that it's almost as much work to sign a small check as it is to sign a big check. And so when capacity goes down, the checks become bigger and bigger.

And it's more than that, because generally, at least speaking from my experience at USAID, if you are doing a small check to an NGO, it's actually a lot more work than processing a large contribution to a UN agency, because you're using a different mechanism. When you're making a UN contribution, it's a much more straightforward process. You don't have to do a competitive process. You're just contributing against an appeal. You don't need to do an open competitive solicitation or anything like that. So it's actually a lot easier for donors to give money to the UN. And I think this is why I am pessimistic that the current financial architecture of the system will ever meaningfully deliver on localization. And there just is not the amongst the donors to write a large enough number of smaller checks.

If you own the rails, you can't own the trains.

That's another way to put it.

And I couldn't agree more. And I think it's baffling to me that we continue to concentrate more and more power in a few big agencies, who at the same time have an operational role. And if you want to be a big aggregator, say, for example, of all the funding for cash programming, you need some really strong technical people to make sure that we get it right and we do it in the right way. But it has to be so that your incentive is to grow a healthy ecosystem of competitive providers, of services, not that you are one of those providers yourself. It is sort of one-on-one in terms of...

It is, but it's not a conscious choice that anyone has ever made to design it this way. It's sort of grown this way. And so the first paper I wrote at CGD was actually about this question.

Of course. I mean, and I think we have got to stop being naive. Of course they would resist it if they benefit from it.I mean, I think I would, if I was in that position.

And I think it's important to be a little nuanced about how we characterize that position too, because saying they benefit from it, I think if a UN agency were in the room, they would say, well, it's not us that benefits. It's our mission and our mandate. And the more resources we have to deliver on our mandate, of course we're going to pursue that. And I think there is a level at which the UN agencies here are being rational economic actors, responding rationally to the incentives donors have created.

I actually agree with that, right? I think the problem is, as you say, when you go from $5 to $35, $40, you become so big that you can make the weather yourself, in a sense. I think it's that volume. And I also don't think that we're dealing with nasty people with a secret plan.

No, it comes from a sincerely, a really mission-driven place of feeling always as though the mission is underfunded, which, objectively, it is. But I think what the current practice presumes is that the way to organize humanitarian financing is around that agency mandates should be the organizing logic of humanitarian financing. And there, I think that hasn't served us well.

So how do we correct that?

That's a great question. I did not fully figure that out during my time at CGD. Well, I think in a few ways. I think, well, partly, if this is what donors continue to want, it's what donors are going to continue to get. And so it will take donors being more proactive than I think they've been willing to be if they want to see a different output.

So it has to come from the donors?

I think it, in part, has to come from the donors. I think another thing that I find really interesting and encouraging is how the increasing prominence and the louder and louder voice of local organizations and global south organizations is factoring into humanitarian decision-making, not nearly enough, frankly. And you can see that, again, this week in Geneva in the refugee space, where there is a much more prominent, much more visible role of refugee-led organizations than there would have been four years ago. But they're still on the outside looking in, for the most part.

I was going to say, it's clear that the discourse is changing.

Yeah, right, right. But the practice isn't.

Yeah. And if you look at, for example, Ukraine and the way we had a very capable civil society wanting to contribute, and there was a massive disconnect in the beginning.

There is. And Ukraine is a fascinating example of this. You know, obviously, a lot of capacity in civil society there. I talked to a partner of ours. So we've done a lot of, Refugees International has done quite a bit of work over the past year organizing convenings for national NGOs in Ukraine to help them get organized to better influence the donors. And that has resulted in the creation of what's called the Ukraine Humanitarian Alliance, which is a sort of NGO committee of the major Ukrainian-led NGOs in Ukraine that has been pushing the donors and pushing the UN system very, very hard to say, look, we are here, we're doing a lot of the work, if not most of the work on the front lines, and yet we're getting only a fraction of the funding. And it has really helped having that and doing those convenings and building that new alliance really has helped create a kind of focal point that the donors in the UN can engage with. And the latest round of allocations from the Ukraine Humanitarian Fund, the UN Pooled Fund, I think about 35 million of that went towards Ukrainian-led organizations, which was dramatically more than any of the previous rounds. So that, you know, it is making some progress. One of the interesting kind of structural disconnects is, you know, those type of decisions tend to get made in the capital. And most national and local organizations are not based in the capital. They're based in whatever, you know, communities they're operating out of. And so there's just kind of a, there's not really an easy path for them to engage. And so some of the other work that we did at Center for Global Development, and it's something that's also coming up quite a lot in Refugees International's research, is the importance of coordinating more on an area-based model rather than a sector-based model. That in an area-based model, if you kind of center the main hub of coordination geographically, that devolves it out to the regions, and then it's much easier for local partners and national partners to get involved. Whereas if it's all sector-based, that really puts all of the power in the capital, at the center, and often quite much further away from the national leaders.

So that was another idea that you really promoted in your work around humanitarian reform. Now, that seems to take a sledgehammer to the clusters.

Well, that, I wouldn't say a sledgehammer. It definitely changes the role of the clusters. And, you know, one of the analogies that I used when we were developing that paper was, you know, the way that the clusters work is a little bit like, you know, if an NGO or a donor decided to organize all of its work around its technical sectors, through its kind of like technical quality team, rather than its country programs. And you don't see any NGO. Every NGO operates country programs, almost every NGO. And then the technical sectors support. They support program quality. They support design, you know, oversight. They're a quality control mechanism. But they're not the entity that's kind of driving the operations. And the clusters are a little bit like if the technical actors were driving the operations. And that was never really intended to be their role. The other thing we analyzed for that paper was just looking at how much of the appeals that come out of the clusters prioritize funding towards the cluster lead agencies. And you will not be surprised to learn it is a vast amount. And so there too, you know, that the clusters have been kind of co-opted by the financing model. And so what we were proposing was more of reverting the clusters to a version of what they were originally intended to be, which was accountability for technical quality and a backstop if there was no, you know, if there were no actors that were doing a thing to be the provider of last resort. What the clusters have kind of done is turn the cluster leads into the providers of first resort, whereas the intent was to make them the providers of last resort if no one else was doing it. So yeah, I mean, a sledgehammer to what the clusters have become, I would say not quite a sledgehammer, but it would definitely shift quite a lot what the clusters have become, but it would actually move them back towards something closer to what they were originally intended to be.

And I guess delinking them from the big operational agencies that host them also?

Not necessarily delinking them, I think I think delinking the presumption that all of the funding should flow on that kind of a logic.

You also write about how coordination meetings must be more inclusive or more, right? And I think that's such an important point, because I have been with even very strong national partners that I've worked with, and I've seen how they've been silenced whenever they step into an HCT, or it's just not their scene. How can we change that?

I was talking to one of the national partners we've worked with in Ukraine, and she was in Washington recently, and she said, yeah, we were so surprised when the international groups came in, and we thought, okay, they're going to come and talk to us, and then they didn't. And she said, that must be really unusual. Like, why did it happen in Ukraine? And I said, no, that's just how it normally works. She was shocked that that's how it normally works. I think moving to more of an area-based logic is a big part of that, because if you center all of the decision-making at a kind of agency leadership level in the capital, that immediately creates a huge barrier to participation by local and national groups. Translation, frankly, would go a long way. I mean, every coordination, not every, I won't say every, the vast majority of coordination meetings, and I come from an NGO fieldwork background originally, the vast majority of meetings that I would ever have been in would have been in English or in French. And for a national organization, if it's not in an Anglophone or Francophone country, they're too, huge barrier to entry. So, you know, we still sort of frame coordination as, we sort of frame it where the national groups need to come to the system, rather than the system going to meet them where they are. And so I think there's a geographic element to that, of kind of decentralizing decision-making closer to the front lines, closer to the areas where those local leaders are present. There is a translation element to that, and there has to be a financing element to that, being much, much more intentional about kind of creating channels to finance local leadership. And the country-based pooled funds have done that somewhat unevenly, but they at least have a way to do that. But we still don't really have a way at a global level to finance localization at scale. And I think that is one of the big, one of the big missing pieces.

I also wonder whether we have the institutions that can enable that change.

I don't think we do. I don't think we do. I think if, you know, if the major international agencies were going to drive that and really own that, I think it would have happened by now. And there has been progress. I think there, you know, in the grand bargain, self-reporting, there are agencies that are shifting larger proportions of their kind of internal budgets towards local, towards local partners. But that's not what the grand bargain called for. The grand bargain called for that funding to go as directly as possible. And that still is not happening. We've been, made almost no progress on that direct financing. And I think, I think the reason is the current financial architecture simply can't. There is not a vehicle in the current financial architecture to fund localization at scale. And this is where, again, I think the, there's a lot to be learned from the models of the Global Fund and GAVI in creating an entity that can raise funds on a contribution basis, just like a UN agency does.

So a donor sits on the board and can write very large checks into a sort of common multilateral pool, but then can allocate that funding down directly to partners at a country level. There's nothing like that in the system right now. And I think some, some version of that could be the solution to financing localization.

So what you're saying is, we need a GAVI for the humanitarian sector.

Something like that.

We need to not smash the clusters, that'd be nice. We need to bring the clusters back to the original thought and adopt an area-based coordination model that is more inclusive at the front line.

And independent accountability.

Exactly. And, you know, make the customer king, whatever you want to say. Strengthen the voice. And think in terms of agency of crisis-affected populations instead of accountability for us, so that we are not the main character in the story we're telling ourselves. I think that's really important. And then I think you have a fourth big idea, which is around governance. What is it you think needs to change in terms of humanitarian governance?

So many things. I'll point to a few, and I don't, I don't claim to have, you know, and I don't think within our research, we really felt like we got all the answers on this. But one major shift that's needed is simply representation. So if you look at the global governance models of many of the, many of the major institutions in the system, the people that they serve have a limited, have limited to no role in the governance of the organization. That's particularly true for the, you know, for the big multilateral agencies. Because, you know, if you're a UN agency, your governing body is states, is member states. And, you know, people, the people you serve, you know, may show up and be able to speak after all the member states have spoken. But the real power sits with the member states. And there was an interesting, again, I think it was so intriguing being on Gavi's board. So Gavi is structured differently. They're not a multilateral organization. They are a, I mean, you know, I think legally they're, they're, they may be structured as a Swiss NGO, but they have a governing body that consists of kind of equal shares of donors, recipient countries, in that case, because they buy vaccines for countries, and then independent experts and civil society members. And they're sort of equal voting shares allocated across all of those different, those different parts of the governing board. And so there would be instances in particularly some of the very contentious, they're not content, they were never contentious, but some of the, I'd say, fairly challenging conversations around vaccine purchasing, which could get very political, as you can imagine, where the civil society representatives or some of the independent technical experts from the global south would have a vote that was equivalent to what I had representing the U.S. government in a constituency of three other donors. And so, you know, as a government in that time, I had an important voice in the process that certainly by virtue of the U.S. size, I think was informally greater than our formal representation. But civil society and recipient countries had a voice that was much more, it was much closer to equivalent than you have in any kind of traditional multilateral governance model. So I think that bringing, kind of looking at ways of restructuring multilateral governance, and again, this is, this would be very ambitious, it would be very difficult. But I also have a hard time seeing how you get real change without doing something like this. There was a fascinating proposal by a colleague who worked for Asylum Access, I think, when he wrote it, wrote a piece in Humanitarian Exchange a few months ago, arguing for a similar kind of governance overhaul at UNHCR, arguing that refugees should be formally represented with, kind of, decisional influence and authority within the UNHCR governing body. And I think that sort of idea is really powerful and really fascinating, and it feels also very distant right now, but is the sort of thing that the sector should be working towards. Within NGOs, there's a kind of parallel question. So one of the other pieces of research that we did at Center for Global Development was looking at, you know, diversity and representation within NGO boards, and we looked at the 15 or 20 biggest international humanitarian NGOs, and what we found was very, you know, pretty good balance of representation in terms of gender representation, a lot weaker in terms of representation by the people those organizations served, or people even who came from the countries where they worked. There were some, and some organizations do a lot better than others, and I think there is generally a trend to get better on that and moving in the right direction, but it was still clearly like a weak area. And now that I run an NGO and have a board, it is a challenge. There's just a structural challenge there, if you are based in a given country, to meaningfully identify and meaningfully bring on representatives of people you serve. So we have on our board at Refugees International, we have a number of people who are current or former refugees, but generally people who now live in the United States, and so they bring some of that lens and some of that perspective, but I think it's an area that we are grappling with as an organization. It's not an easy thing always to address, but I think it's a necessary thing to address. It's also an easier thing for NGOs to fix than it is for a multilateral agency. I think that kind of building representation of the people served into the governance process, the different agency governing models is really important.

But I have a follow-up, because we're talking about representation, we're talking about diversity, and I'm sitting here and looking at a mirror image of myself, I mean we have beards, glasses, the beards are getting gray, we're too old, or at least middle-aged men.

Call ourselves middle-aged.

Middle-aged, we'll cut out the old bit there.

What's your thinking around the responsibility of people like us, who have had careers that have been privileged in many ways, should we just shut up?

So I think that for, and this is a question that Refugees International at an organizational level is grappling with. We are an organization that has traditionally been about refugees more than we've been of refugees, and so we have started some new initiatives around elevating refugee voices in global governance and global decision making. So we have a refugee fellows program where we have affiliated and partnered with a number of people, very just amazing and dynamic refugee leaders who lead their own networks and their own organizations. So we partner with them, we provide some funding to some of their work, we co-develop, we're co-developing ideas and research and advocacy together. And in sessions like the Global Refugee Forum, the COP28, which is just wrapping up in Dubai, and other global governance processes, we are finding ways to turn our seats over to them. And so in the Bonn Intercessional in preparation for COP over the summer, one of those fellows, who is a climate activist from Afghanistan, originally from Afghanistan, delivered the U.S. old habit. So at the Bonn Intercessional over the summer in preparation for COP, we turned our slot, our speaking slot, over to one of the fellows, who is a climate activist from Afghanistan. The woman who runs that program, who is a staff member of ours, and is a Palestinian refugee who grew up in Lebanon, she represented Refugees International in our slot at the UNHCR Executive Committee earlier this fall. So I think for organizations that have that kind of power, that have that entry into the formal system, using that to bring other voices, bring other leaders into those spaces, that is part of how we're trying to do that. We're also doing that through some of our travel and our field work. So we recently did a research mission in Greece, looking at the situation for Iraqi Yazidi refugees who are now in Greece. And we chose that in part because one of the fellows is a prominent Yazidi activist. And now he on his own probably would not have been able to get entry into those camps from the Greek government. We were able to engage through the U.S. Embassy and get entry approved. But once we got into the camp, of course, he was able to do far more than we on our own.

So that partnership of that kind of marriage of expertise and authentic connection to a refugee population with the kind of knowledge and expertise of how to move some of the formal levers of kind of diplomatic power yielded a really good outcome. And that's the kind of model that we are trying to move towards as Refugees International. And I think it's also how we need to think more broadly about the role of international leadership within the refugee architecture and humanitarian architecture. I was talking with a friend about this who's struggling with it in her kind of grappling with similar dynamics in her own organization. She said we are kind of midwives of the new system and the undertakers of the old system. So I thought that was a useful way to think about it. We're still a foot in each, but trying to use the platform and the power that we have to move the system in the right direction and to model that in our own organization.

It's a good answer. Maybe the last question, Jeremy. So you've done all this work. You've sat in a very central position in the USG, in the humanitarian sector. You went to a think tank and thought some great thoughts. You're now the president of an organization with a platform. And you presented some really good ideas. And I think they will make a difference. I also think we're in a hurry. So what the heck can we do to scale, to be fit for what's coming?

I can't pretend to fully know the answer to that. I can tell you one thing we shouldn't do, which is just continue to defer some of the hard conversations. I remember very well in 2015-2016 when we were first negotiating the grand bargain, when we were preparing for the World Humanitarian Summit. And the world felt very busy at that time. And it's a little bit funny to look back now with all that's going on in the world and think how uniquely busy we felt in 2015. But there was a very strong sense, particularly from not just from the aid agency, like many of the donors shared this, that yes, the humanitarian sector has many problems. But now is not the time to do a more fundamental reimagining of how this should all work. There is too much going on. We are too busy. There are too many crises. So we couldn't possibly have that conversation now. We'll have a less ambitious, more technical conversation, and then kind of defer the bigger conversations till some point in the future. And of course, eight years on from that, the world is even busier. There are even more crises. And 2015, by the standards of 2023, does not look uniquely busy. It looks like just the normal that we are in now. And I think it is always easy to say we are too busy to tackle the bigger structural problems. But total humanitarian financing has almost doubled over that period. So while we were too busy to kind of think about financing in a different way, we doubled the size of the existing model. And we can continue to do that. But at some point, I think we just need to acknowledge that if you agree that the system is dysfunctional, that it is not operating in the way that it should, that it cannot deliver on the commitments it makes for itself. And again, we have been committing particularly to shift power to affected people for 20 plus years, if not even much longer, and it still has not meaningfully happened. It is not going to happen unless we can overcome that attitude.

No, and I think if I can point to one piece that I think somehow is missing in what we have discussed today, because I think you have many good suggestions, I think it would change part of it. But I think we need to hedge our bets. And the problem I see right now is that almost all the money goes into big institutions where people like you and me and all our colleagues work. And we are dependent on that business model. And it is very hard to actually swim against that stream. But we can, what is the saying, we can walk and chew gum at the same time? We should be able to. But it is almost like this business of coordination and the need to streamline everything makes it almost illegal to think a thought that does not fit into what UNHCR, WFP wants. And I think we need to seriously hedge our bets and throw some money at alternative thinking. Not crumbs, but a serious investment in incubating and growing a new generation of humanitarian organizations that can fill out the gaps and that can connect with the people we need to connect to and help us scale in a much more agile way.

Yeah, I think any change in the system will be incremental. It is not going to be flipping the switch and the next funding cycle, everything changes. It will be gradual and it will be slow.

But I think some of the changes that we proposed in that research at CGD, if they were done, and this is what I wish in retrospect the grand bargain could have been. A lot of my research at CGD was motivated by my own sort of disenchantment with where the grand bargain had ended up and a desire to think, okay, well, if we had that kind of political opportunity again, what would we want to do with it? Because I felt as a donor at the time, when you are a donor, or any kind of operator, you do not have the time to think really deeply about the big picture. You are kind of constantly pulling levers. And when I kind of looked in the landscape, I did not see the vision for what the system should move towards that I could enact as a donor. So I was trying to fill some of that intellectual gap. I do not know when the next big political opportunity will be. I think in retrospect, as much as we all kind of, I think there was a lot of sort of cynicism about the World Humanitarian Summit, but it did create a political moment that I think we did not capitalize on as much as we could have. And I do not know when the next one of those will come.

Yeah. Yeah, I surprised myself actually by getting really angry in Istanbul. I just could not keep it. I could not. I got mad.

Yeah. Yeah. Because it was not taking on the big fundamental. And I feel a little bit, I am not mad about it per se, because I am not a mad person. But you know, when I look at the agenda this week for the Global Refugee Forum, it does feel kind of disconnected from some of the realities we see around us, right? What is the reality that I see in the global refugee space right now?I see a huge erosion in support for the fundamental sanctity and protections of asylum. You see major donor governments to the UN system that are leading that erosion. The UK is leading that erosion. The US, frankly, in some respects, is leading that erosion. Many European countries. You know, front lines of the erosion of the global asylum norms are the US southern border, the Mediterranean Sea, and the English Channel. That will barely, if at all, be discussed at the Global Refugee Forum. We also see that sort of extending into then major refugee hosting countries. So many of the countries hosting Syrians are getting very fatigued by that and wanting to send them home. But there's no possibility of doing that safely. There's no solution on the table. There's no solution on the table for Syrians. And fundamentally, that's a political question, not a technical one. Very similar dynamic right now for Afghans. Much more a political question than a technical one.

Very similar conversation coming for Venezuelans. And you know, you could name others. Just those three populations alone are 15-ish million refugees in the world. So those are the kinds of conversations that are very political conversations. They're the kind of conversations that we really struggle with in the humanitarian sector. We want to turn everything into a technical issue. That's what we need to be talking about, frankly. But it is hard. And look, it's hard for UNHCR to surface those conversations, because again, it goes back to the governance, right? To whom is UNHCR accountable? They're accountable to their member states. Is that a conversation those member states want to have? Not really.

I don't actually know what to say to that, because I just agree. And I think this business of happily focusing on little technical details and excellence while forgetting, as you say, reshaping the political scene. We can't just be focused on service delivery. We have to hold the powers that be accountable and push the envelope.

And this is a big part of why I wanted to come to Refugees International, just to kind of close the loop a little bit, is as an advocacy organization, that is why we exist. And we don't take, we have never, I won't say never, because I don't know all the financial history going back 45 years. But in the sort of recent memory and history of the organization, we have never taken UN or government funding for that reason. Because we want to be able to preserve the independence to push those conversations forward, and be able to be unfettered in trying to hold organizations and countries accountable. And ultimately, these are political questions, and we need to have spaces where we can have political conversations in the humanitarian sector. And it's very, very hard, again, because of this deep-rooted tendency to turn everything into a technical conversation.

I think that's a great place to end our conversation. Thank you so much for all your work and your commitment to the sector, but also for coming and sharing your thoughts with us. It's been a great conversation.

It's been a great conversation. Always a pleasure.

Thank you.