The refugee crisis remains unresolved and the political divide that has emerged is driving a wedge into the cracks in the fragile processes that have been painstakingly stitched together in the past 20 years of humanitarian development. Progress wasn’t always perfect, in fact it was fraught with compromise, a key component of wide stakeholder consultation, but it was striving to improve through a process of iteration. I have little doubt that the agencies involved were doing their professional best to provide the services and meet the needs of refugee’s as best as possible in an equitable manner as possible with the resources they had.
Enter political grand-standing and policy at a national level and those efforts have been severely hampered. Yet, it does provide an opportunity to review the situation, to take a look at where we stand in the paradigms of thought on this issue, and when we do, we can see an opportunity emerge to move beyond addressing symptoms of the crisis with the provision of professional services to understanding the problem is not just them, it is also us.
This great 4 minute video from the Presensing Institute U Lab edx intro course summarises the different paradigms of thought on the refugee crisis very, very well.
The take-away: The refugee crisis will not be resolved without considering the interconnectedness of the systems at play, or the openness of our society and ourselves. Shallow responses will not solve the problem, they will only post-pone it.
All images and video are courtesy of the Presensing Institute U.Lab EDX course.
Nomad-Odyssey 