City Governments as Humanitarian Actors: Learning from the Global Cities Fund for Migrants and Refugees

By Samer Saliba, Director of City Practice at the Mayors Migration Council and Senior Fellow at the Henry J. Leir Institute

Contrary to the common public image, most people displaced from their homes live in cities, not camps. The working assumption among humanitarian practitioners and scholars is that displaced people move to cities over camps given greater opportunities for work, access to public and social services, and autonomy, such as freedom of movement and control over one’s time, resources, and relationships. Yet the humanitarian system still relies on camps as a solution to displacement, while humanitarian actors have limited capacity to adequately operate within urban settings. 

Refugee camps are, at least in part, the result of a historical frame of refugees as a problem to be solved. As Peter Nyers argues in his Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency, “the qualities of visibility, agency, and rational speech of the citizen-subject are conspicuously absent in conventional representations of refugees that cast them as invisible, speechless, and, above all, nonpolitical…speaking about refugees as a technical problem in need of a solution has affected the way in which international efforts to resolve the refugee problem have been structured.” By casting refugees as a problem, they are viewed as merely “accidents of the modern territorial-state” without any chance at citizenship or, more critically, the rights and entitlements that accompany it. As Nyers states, “without citizenship, refugees are denied not only political rights but also something more fundamental – the capacity to speak politically and the expectation that they will be heard.”¹

There are many ways in which refugees are stripped of their voice, representation, and agency, often by the structures meant to protect them. Instead, they are victims in need of international protection that can often be boiled down to the basics of food, shelter, and healthcare; basics that are most easily provided in a camp setting. But the increasing number of forcibly displaced seeking safety and opportunity in cities creates an opportunity for citizenship and agency; not national citizenship, but urban citizenship. 

This opportunity is best seen not through a lens of humanitarian theory, but urban theory. As Andy Merrifield explains in his book, The politics of the encounter: urban theory and protest under planetary urbanization: 

Citizenship must be conceived as something urban, as something territorial, yet one in which territoriality is narrower and broader than both “city” and “nationality.” A citizen of the block, of the neighborhood, becomes a citizen of the world, a universal citizen rooted in place, encountering fellow citizens across the corridor and at the other end of the planet.²

While national governments and international actors must rely on rigid definitions of national citizenship and the problematic history of refugeeness, cities offer forcibly displaced people an opportunity at urban citizenship; a citizenship that is best supported not by traditional humanitarian actors but by city governments. 

 My 15-year career transitioning from New York City-based city planner to international aid worker and now to working alongside over 200 cities around the world at the Mayors Migration Council has centered on one question: what does humanitarian intervention look like when delivered by city governments instead of international humanitarian actors? With evidence from the MMC’s Global Cities Fund for Migrants and Refugees (GCF), we now have over 25 answers. The GCF responds to the unmet needs of cities as they support migrants, refugees, and internally displaced people in the face of pressing challenges, from global pandemics to the climate crisis. While most resources tied to displacement go to international NGOs or central governments, missing opportunities to leverage the local knowledge, long-term plans, and willingness of cities and the mayors who lead them, the GCF directly funds city governments to implement inclusive programs of their own design.³ In the process, the GCF builds precedents of fiscal feasibility in city governments that are often disregarded by the international humanitarian system while showing that a new way of delivering humanitarian interventions possible.  

As described in the MMC’s 2023 GCF Progress Report, the GCF has funded over 25 cities and counting, with all GCF city grantees making new institutional commitments to support their migrant and displaced communities beyond their project time frames. Projects include Medellín, Colombia’s emergency shelter for over 300 migrant and refugee families at risk of homelessness, Beira, Mozambique’s voluntary and dignified relocation of families impacted by storms and rising sea levels, or Bogotá, Colombia’s first-ever center dedicated to improving the nutritional conditions of migrant and refugee children, pregnant women, and nursing mothers. These projects have not only directly served over 25,000 people, they have provided evidence that city governments are capable humanitarian actors who view refugees not as a problem to be solved, but citizens of their cities, entitled to the same rights and privileges as any other resident. As for mayor Claudia Lopez of Bogotá stated during her tenure, “our city is committed to guaranteeing the socioeconomic inclusion of our most vulnerable new Bogotános. With the support of the Global Cities Fund for Migrants and Refugees, we are strengthening Bogotá’s commitment to defend the rights of all residents – especially our youngest and newest residents – to access critical public services.”⁴

There is evidence that mayors and their city governments are willing humanitarian actors capable of seeing past emergency responses and basic needs towards longer-term solutions that benefits both displaced and long-standing communities.⁵ While my research as a PhD student at The New School’s Milano School hopes to present further evidence, I have seen firsthand that centering city governments as humanitarian actors creates more potential for creating the conditions for urban refugees to thrive as members of a global citizenry within an urban environment, in line with Merrifield. Investing in city governments presents a path towards a new form of humanitarian action: one that unlocks the urban citizenship of displaced people while shifting away from traditional responses that center them as people in need rather than people who are needed. 

Sources

[1] Nyers, Peter. Rethinking Refugees: Beyond State of Emergency. Routledge. 2006 

[2] Merrifield, Andy (2013). The politics of the encounter: urban theory and protest under planetary urbanization. University of Georgia Press, Athens. 

[3] Saliba, S. and Zanuso, V. Municipal Finance for Migrants and Refugees: The State of Play. April 2022. Available at: https://www.mayorsmigrationcouncil.org/news/muni-fi-report. Accessed October 18 2023.

[4] Global Cities Fund for Migrants and Refugees: Progress Report. Mayors Migration Council. December 2023. Available here: https://mayorsmigrationcouncil.org/news/gcf-progress-report-2023/

[5] Saliba, Samer and Yousef Shawarbeh. The value of mayors in urban displacement settings: The case of Amman, Jordan. Elgar Handbook on Forced Migration. 2023. Available at: https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/book/9781839104978/book-part-9781839104978-51.xml