Between Donor Power and Refugee Needs: How UNRWA’s Bureaucracy Manages Permanent Budgetary Crisis

How do bureaucrats in international organizations signal crises to their central constituents, especially in protracted conflict, refugee, or aid environments? When some form of crisis is an almost daily occurrence, IOs have an incentive to continually highlight their plight in order to sustain the attention of the international community and keep donor contributions high. Over time, however, this can be a self-defeating enterprise: too many claims of crisis, and donors may stop taking them seriously. How do IO bureaucrats manage this tradeoff between highlighting their needs and risking not being taken seriously? We argue in this paper that an important tool that IO staff are annual reports or other official documents. These reports, and the specific use of language therein, provide IO bureaucrats with a vehicle to signal significant changes and enhanced risk of crisis to powerful donor states. We focus our analysis on annual reports from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which has, since the 1950s, been the UN agency responsible for supporting several million Palestine refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The organization works in the context of one of the most salient protracted geopolitical disputes and in a region that has seen repeated conflict and significant displacement events over time. This context has a direct impact on the politics of UNRWA’s funding. In order to be able to deliver its permanent and emergency street-level services, UNRWA depends on its bureaucracy to fundraise in this complicated environment. This has left the agency in near-permanent financial stress and suffering from frequent budget crises. These problems become particularly acute when the agency’s biggest and most powerful donors—such as the US—withhold funding, as the Trump administration recently did when it cut its funding for the organization entirely in 2018. Through sentiment analysis of UNRWA annual reports between 1951 and 2016, we explore the variation in the language that the agency uses to signal its needs to powerful donors, on the one hand, and vulnerable constituents and ground-level staff, on the other hand. We show that crisis language closely follows critical periods for the organization, suggesting that the agency does, indeed, use annual reports strategically. We combine the text analysis with comprehensive data on donor contributions and agency expenditures to explore the extent to which this strategy is successful in securing additional funding, controlling for central confounders. The quantitative analysis is complemented with semi-structured interviews with UNRWA and donor officials. Our analysis suggests that the underexplored avenue of bureaucratic language provides IO staff with a crucial vehicle to highlight their needs to key donors in a differentiated manner.