Strategic Response of Donor Organisations to Global Crises: Refugee Crisis

The paper is focused on the response of donor countries to cope with the refugee and migration crisis. There has been a considerable re-purposing of EU development assistance to address the root causes of migration and to cover in-donor refugee costs. A number of countries abused this opportunity, diverting up to half of their funds initially meant to be spent on core development programs of developing countries. The author used a case-study analysis to assess European policy decisions, and semi-structured interviews among scholars, policy makers and civil society. The author comes to conclusion that the EU and its Member States, instead of strategic programming on how to resolve this structural issue, used a tactical solution to achieve a short-term goal of stopping migration. It does not correspond with SDGs, nor with common values. Post-truth politics entailed a change of narrative about migration, ignoring evidence-based arguments about migration-development nexus.