Gatekeepers or Facilitators? Host Governments, Refugees and Humanitarian Aid Effectiveness

Why does the effectiveness of humanitarian aid vary so widely across contexts, even when objectives and resources appear similar? This article argues that effectiveness depends not only on funding, coordination, or capacity but also on an overlooked factor: how host governments strategically position recipient populations—often refugees—within their domestic political agendas. Building on four EU-funded case studies (Lebanon, Myanmar, Mali, and Mozambique, 2015–2020) and seventy-one interviews with EU, UN, and NGO officials, the study shows that when governments politicize refugees as threatening, they obstruct aid delivery. Conversely, when refugees are not politicized, governments tend to facilitate external aid, even if corruption or weak capacity still limit results. The article makes three contributions to IR scholarship. First, it contributes to theoretical debates on state–recipient dynamics by demonstrating that domestic political considerations, not just external constraints, critically shape humanitarian outcomes. Second, it provides an empirically grounded comparative analysis of how government–refugee relations condition crisis response, linking IR’s broader concerns with state authority, migration, and humanitarianism. Third, it develops a multidimensional framework of aid effectiveness that moves beyond narrow measures of goal attainment, offering a context-sensitive tool for analysing humanitarian aid across cases