Consent and Contingency
How to make cross-border aid future-proof

On 11 July 2024 the Assad regime’s authorisation for UN access to northwest Syria via the Bab al-Hawa border crossing expired. The expected six-month renewal came quietly, contrasting with previous years of nerve-racking last-minute diplomacy when reauthorisation by the Security Council was required. Last July, the Council failed to approve an extension. Instead, continued access was achieved via a consent agreement between OCHA and the Assad regime. Despite slipping from the headlines, the future of cross-border aid remains uncertain, and there is a growing likelihood that donors and Syrian NGOs will take things into their own hands.

The uncertainty has two prime sources. Firstly, there is a loss of trust among donors and NGOs in the UN’s seriousness on contingency planning and transparent communication. The 2023 earthquake was a stress test that the UN failed. Over the past months, the UN’s line has been that the consent agreement was stable and that there was nothing to worry about. This did not reassure donors and NGOs, who expected the UN to engage in comprehensive dialogue on the diplomacy surrounding the agreement and on the possible consequences if the parties failed to reach an accord. The second source of uncertainty is simply that the cross-border mechanism depends on the consent of the Assad regime – which has a long record of denying access, to the point of starving people. Trust in regime-dependent consent is seen as delusional. 

To rebuild trust and chart a way forward, donors and NGOs are demanding a collaborative process. This has become even more urgent with early recovery assistance gaining prominence. Six-month timelines are problematic for emergency aid, but make more complex ER programming virtually impossible. The UN seems to have considered these demands when it revised the concept note of its Early Recovery Trust Fund (ERTF), which it plans to share with donors in late July. Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator (RC/HC) Adam Abdelmoula said that the ERTF will be fully accessible to the northwest, and that he proposed that its governing body should include donors and NGOs with both decision-making and oversight authority. This would be something new, and if the UN followed through, it would set a precedent that would raise questions as to why the other two UN multi-donor pooled funds, the Syria Humanitarian Fund (SHF) and the Syria Cross-Border Humanitarian Fund (SCHF), are not similarly inclusive. 

Donors and NGOs would be well advised to push further for inclusivity, and then use their seats at the table to address the elephant in the room: the persisting dependence of the UN-led cross-border response on Assad. A robust contingency mechanism is the obvious way forward because that is the best reassurance for continued consent. This, however, creates a dilemma for the UN. While indispensable, given the regime’s obduracy, a robust contingency mechanism would imply that the UN’s leading role in the cross-border response was not necessarily essential.  

Keen to guard its raison d’etre, the UN has been antagonistic towards the only existing contingency mechanism, the Aid Fund for Northern Syria (AFNS). This is a multi-donor, pooled fund that already has an inclusive governance system and which, together with its local NGO partners, could gradually take over OCHA’s role in managing multi-donor pooled funding. OCHA sees itself as being in competition for funding with the AFNS, but this zero-sum mentality undermines the most effective use of limited resources. 

The consent agreement’s notorious unreliability and the AFNS position as an inclusive platform to harmonise donor interests with genuine localisation and peacebuilding efforts make a strong case for complementarity and for a gradual UN exit, which would need to be closely coordinated with all parties. The UN should view such a smooth exit as a testament to operational success rather than a turf loss.