From a Seat at the Table to Reshaping the Room: Why We Centre Agency

This is the third in a series of pieces on refugee-led organisations (RLOs) and localisation, and what it truly demands of the humanitarian system. The first explored whether localisation is even the right word. The second argued that the system needs an equity lens, because equality is actually a trap for RLOs. This one is about the limits of meaningful participation - and why we built CALLS Network around agency instead.

When we sat down to define our founding values, one question kept returning: should the meaningful participation of refugee leaders and refugee-led organisations (RLOs) be one of our core commitments? The answer was "no": meaningful participation is important, but it simply isn't enough.

Where the conversation already stands

The global discourse has moved a long way from consultation to participation, and refugee leaders deserve the credit for that shift. But R-SEAT's verdict on the 2023 Global Refugee Forum, "We Were Seen, But Were We Heard?", captured something that keeps recurring: numbers in the room don't translate into influence over agendas or decisions.[1]

Refugee leaders have also been precise and vocal about what tokenism looks like: being invited to share stories of persecution rather than expertise; limited to a few symbolic seats that pit RLOs against each other; brought in only at the moment of announcement rather than throughout design and decision-making; framed as beneficiaries rather than experts.

Their demands are equally clear. Participation must be institutionalised, embedded in ongoing decision-making cycles at global and encompass follow-up at the national level - including pledge implementation, policy dialogue, monitoring, and accountability across a full pledging cycle of the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR).[2]

And most significantly, the Jakarta Declaration on the Right to Participate[3] has moved this from a good practice into the rights arena: a legal right to participate, with obligations on states and institutions to engage in good faith, consider contributions, give reasons, and provide remedy, a sharp departure from the aspirational "will try to continue to develop and support consultative processes" language of the GCR.[4]

Where the conversation fails refugee and displaced communities

It's worth pausing first on how the system itself currently defines meaningful participation, because the definition tells us a great deal about its limits. The Grand Bargain's own founding definition of participation describes an "ongoing dialogue", "seeking communities' perspectives and feedback" and being "responsive to beneficiary concerns,"[5] i.e. a system that listens, but one that remains responsive to rather than designed with the people it serves. UNHCR's most recent guidance on the Refugee Coordination Model follows the same logic: it calls for "meaningful participation and local leadership" - and we have already discussed where ‘local’ fails refugees[6] - alongside "systems to ensure two-way communication and modalities to gather feedback from individuals and communities."[7] Two-way communication and feedback loops are important, but they are still describing consultation, however well-intentioned. The decision-making architecture, who convenes it and who ultimately decides, is left exactly where it was.

What’s more, almost all of this conversation – and the progress made - is anchored in global fora and led by the Global North. Yet approximately 90% of the world's forcibly displaced population lives in low- and middle-income countries, predominantly situated in the Global South. Meaningful participation cannot take hold across the humanitarian system unless it is adopted by major refugee-hosting states and states with internally displaced populations (IDPs) in the Global South as well.

The Global South is also where the coordination structures that actually govern the lives of displaced populations - Humanitarian Country Teams and Refugee Coordination Model, clusters and sectors - remain run by host governments, UNHCR, UN agencies and INGOs. Refugee-led organisations and organisations led by IDPs do not have a seat at these tables.

And even where Northern states have built refugee advisory mechanisms, the agenda is still theirs to set. The asymmetry isn't North versus South so much as it is about who gets to decide what's on the table in the first place.

Which brings us to the deeper problem. "A seat at the table" leaves the table itself untouched - its shape, its rules, whose interests it was built to serve, and who sets the agenda. You can add as many seats as possible for refugee leaders and still be operating inside an architecture designed by others. That's a structural problem and no number of additional chairs solves it.

A zero-sum game?

It would be easy, from here, to slide into a zero-sum debate - RLOs versus INGOs and NNGOs, one side's gain as another's loss.

I don't think that's the right frame, and I don't think it's the productive one either. States, UN agencies, NGOs, national and international, hold resources, access and mandates that RLOs do not hold, and a reformed system needs all of these actors working in an inclusive manner, in real complementarity through equitable partnerships.

The zero-sum debate is also a distraction from the actual question I think matters: what is the table for, who decides that, and what would it mean to build a system around the people most affected, rather than negotiate them a better position within a system someone else designed and that is showing, more than ever before, that it is not fit for purpose.

Why we chose Agency

This is where CALLS Network parts ways with meaningful participation as a founding value, and lands on something we think is more fundamental: agency.

Agency, as we use it, is not a seat, a process, or a consultation mechanism. It is the inherent capacity of refugees - as individuals, as communities, as organisations - to set their own goals, make their own choices, and act as the authors of their own response to displacement.

Agency exists whether or not any institution recognises it.

Meaningful participation, at its best, is one of the vehicles through which that already-existing agency gets expressed inside formal decision-making spaces. Meaningful participation is necessary but it is, by itself, downstream of something larger: agency.

Here is the distinction that matters most to us. Participation asks: how do we get refugees meaningfully into existing decision-making spaces? Agency asks a different question entirely: what would it mean for refugees, their organisations and their communities to be the ones who decide what those spaces are, where they're convened, what counts as a decision worth making, and who else belongs in the room? One is a question about access. The other question shifts the power.

That difference shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. A coordination mechanism built around participation measures itself by how many refugee voices were consulted, how many RLOs were invited to attend or comment, how responsive the final plan was to the feedback gathered. A coordination mechanism built around agency starts somewhere else entirely: held in the field where refugee-led organisations can fully participate, with RLOs co-deciding what "response" even means in their context and what priorities should be, and with host governments, UNHCR, I/NNGOs and RLOs each playing the roles they're genuinely best placed to play in service of that response. The first model can produce, at its best, excellent feedback loops and still leave the underlying architecture of exclusion, and who controls it, completely untouched. The second model shifts the power of who makes decisions.

This is also why agency, unlike participation, cannot be Northern-led almost by definition. You cannot delegate someone else's role in co-creation. A funder, a UN agency or an INGO can resource agency, make space for it, get out of its way - but it cannot manufacture it on behalf of refugee communities the way it can design a more inclusive consultation process. That, to us, is the real test of whether a system has shifted: whether refugees and displaced people were the ones deciding what needed to be said, to whom, and on what terms.

This is also why we think centring agency requires everything participation has built. The institutionalised seats, the legal protections of the Jakarta Declaration, the resourcing commitments - these remain genuinely useful: scaffolding we can use to build a different humanitarian system, inclusive and equitable, rather than the destination itself. Our role at CALLS Network is to support RLOs in using that scaffolding while also building toward the deeper shift: communities and their organisations setting the terms of their own response, with the rest of the system organised in support of that.

That is the reimagining CALLS Network exists for. We hope you'll imagine it with us.

Notes

[1] R-SEAT, We Were Seen, But Were We Heard? Meaningful Refugee Participation at the Global Refugee Forum 2023, An Assessment (July 2024).

[2] R-SEAT, Beyond Presence: Who Shapes Decisions in Global Refugee Governance?, Reflection Note (December 2025).

[3] Independent Declaration on the Right to Participation of Persons with Experience of Forced Displacement or Statelessness (December 2025).

[4] Global Compact on Refugees, para. 34.

[5] Grand Bargain Participation Revolution Workstream's agreed definition document, 8 March 2017.

[6] See my blog: ‘Localisation’ – Are We Using the Right Word?

[7] UNHCR, Refugee Coordination Model, Updated Guidance, October 2024.