Introduction
Since Israel's escalation against Lebanon began in September 2024 and resurged in March 2026, over a million people have been displaced by successive waves of evacuation orders. Lebanese state institutions have mobilized to respond under extraordinarily difficult conditions: within the first three days of the March 2026 escalation alone, nearly 400 government-designated collective shelters opened in schools and public buildings, with most already at full capacity within a week, together accommodating well over 100,000 displaced people. This is a rapid mobilization achieved despite a state still recovering from the 2019 economic collapse, a prolonged presidential vacuum, and severely constrained public finances; officials warned even before the March 2026 escalation that maintaining shelters and supporting the displaced would cost roughly $250 million a month, and have since stated that the state holds only about 30% of the funds required to meet displaced people's needs.
This commentary examines how Lebanon's civil society and grassroots networks, working with the state in a more coordinated response, have complemented, not replaced, government capacity: community kitchens, local shelter coordination, and diaspora-funded aid drives have worked in tandem with municipal and national authorities to stretch limited resources further. But it also asks a harder question. “Complement” does a lot of work in that sentence, and it is worth asking who decides where the state's role ends and informal actors begin, on what terms, and with what accountability. Far from indicating a straightforward state absence, the pattern reflects what is better understood as a social multi-stakeholder partnership, one of cooperation rather than one actor overshadowing the other. Framed only as an efficient administrative arrangement, however, this partnership risks normalizing a durable retreat of the state from welfare provision. Daily, reliable access to public services is one of the primary channels through which citizens' trust in the state is built; the more that channel runs through NGOs, UN agencies, and diaspora networks rather than through state institutions themselves, the more it reshapes the relationship between citizens and the state, not merely how a budget line is spent. This commentary therefore treats the hybrid model as a legitimate and in places genuinely effective emergency response, but one whose legitimacy over time depends on its being governed as transitional, a bridge to rebuilt state capacity rather than a template for permanent delegation, and closes with a set of policy recommendations addressed to the government, donor, and international actors best placed to act on that distinction.
A State Under Strain
The scale of the state's shelter mobilization since 2024 is genuinely notable, given the harsh fiscal environment, the sheer scale of displacement, and the human resources it has demanded. The state operates something like a social multi-stakeholder partnership, coordinating with at least seven other ministries, around 400 NGOs, and roughly 20 UN agencies, managing all of this without an explicit mandate to do so. Ministries and municipalities have repurposed schools, stadiums, and public buildings at very short notice, coordinating registration, the basic service needs of internally displaced people, and, however imperfectly, safety and operating standards across hundreds of sites. That this happened at all, in a country that had already endured a banking collapse and years of economic decline, without some of the state's more basic functions intact, complicates any narrative of straightforward state absence and deserves closer attention. Whether this arrangement strengthens or erodes the state's long-term standing with citizens, however, depends less on its administrative efficiency than on whether it is treated, and publicly framed, as a stopgap while state capacity is rebuilt, or normalized as a lasting substitute for direct provision, a distinction returned to below.
Yet official figures put this achievement in perspective. As of mid-2026, the broader Lebanon Response Plan (LRP) remained only around 44.8% funded, while Lebanese officials separately report that the state itself holds only about 30% of the funds required to meet displaced people's needs. Whichever figure one uses, a state and response system operating at less than half its required budget cannot simply do more of what it is already doing. It has to choose, implicitly or explicitly, what to shed to actors outside the formal state apparatus. Understanding the 2024-2026 response therefore requires asking how those choices were made, not only cataloging that an already existing hybrid system was strengthened, but also asking on what terms it should eventually be scaled back as fiscal space allows.
The Hybrid Model in Practice
In Beirut, the community kitchen Nation Station resumed emergency operations within days of the March 2026 escalation; by 5 March, volunteers and chefs were cooking around 1,000 meals a day for three nearby collective shelters. By April 2026, Nation Station and the Eco Hub run by Ahla Fawda together were serving over 28,761 meals a day, staffed by volunteers who showed up daily at these and many other sites. Coverage of the kitchens' 2024 operations similarly described Nation Station delivering roughly 3,000 meals a day to over a dozen schools sheltering displaced people. Migrant-led groups filled a parallel gap: the Reclaim Our Rights collective, a coalition of women migrant workers, organized community kitchens, food boxes, and rent assistance specifically for displaced migrant women, a population largely outside the reach of government shelters. The pattern across these initiatives is one of coordination with the formal system rather than integration into it: kitchens deliver to government-designated shelters but remain independently funded, staffed, and managed.
At the institutional level, formal coordination runs through structures such as the LRP, the Cash Working Group, and the Site Management and Coordination Technical Committee, which IOM co-chairs alongside Lebanese authorities to support displaced populations in collective sites and facilitate eventual dignified site closures. More broadly, OCHA reports that coordination on Lebanon's roughly 640 collective shelters, as of June 2026, involved the Lebanese Red Cross, the Disaster Risk Monitoring unit at the Prime Minister's office, provincial governors, municipalities, and the Ministry of Social Affairs working together, a multi-actor arrangement whose effectiveness depends heavily on municipal capacity, and therefore varies by locality.
Diaspora networks have funneled remittances and in-kind donations through a patchwork of platforms, some coordinated with municipalities, many not. At the organizational level, the diaspora professional network LebNet launched a campaign in April 2026 to raise $10 million for Lebanon, drawing on more than 4,500 professionals across North America and channeling funds to vetted humanitarian organizations on the ground. At the individual level, the response is more informal and dispersed: Lebanese Americans in Michigan and elsewhere have organized local fundraisers and set aside personal earnings weekly to support relatives and communities in the hardest-hit areas of southern Lebanon, with researchers noting a preference for direct, community-based giving over reliance on government channels, Lebanese or foreign. This layer of response sits furthest from formal state coordination: it moves largely through remittance platforms and direct relationships between diaspora members and specific families or localities, which maximizes speed and trust but leaves little visibility for state planners trying to map where resources actually land.
This dynamic is effective, and in places indispensable, for immediate survival. However, remittance and diaspora flows that move outside formal banking and tax channels do not build the state's own revenue base. A response that depends on undocumented, largely untaxed private transfers is, in that sense, financing recovery in a way that leaves Lebanon's structural fiscal weaknesses untouched, and may deepen reliance on external inflows over which the state has little visibility or control. Addressing that reliance is a question larger than this commentary can resolve, but it points toward two connected reform agendas worth flagging for further work: reform of the development financing model, including the role international financial institutions play in structuring aid and debt around protracted crises, and reform of the Lebanese state's own, structurally constrained capacity to mobilize domestic resources equitably. Neither is a humanitarian-sector fix, but both reflect directly on whether the hybrid model described here can ever smooth the way to something more institutionalized.
This pattern is not new to Lebanon: it echoes the response to the 2020 Beirut port explosion and, further back, the informal welfare arrangements that filled gaps in state provision throughout the post-civil-war period. What is different in 2024-2026 is the degree to which municipal and national authorities have, in specific documented instances, actively structured space for these actors rather than each working separately. During the crisis, MOSA, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Health issued shelter-management guidelines, as well as guidance on WASH and food distribution, and only registered NGOs were permitted to assist. As a MOSA official described it, the ministry led on registering internally displaced people in shelters, controlled the overall narrative around the response, and coordinated with the international community, prioritizing funding accordingly; that money then flowed to NGOs on the basis of priorities set in consultation with them, since UN agencies and local NGOs each carry their own mandates and priorities that the government had to work around. The effort was coordinated across the Lebanon Response Plan and its various sectors, spanning the UN, the government, and local NGOs. “Coordination is a real hassle,” the official said. “It is a genuine effort, under emergency and under need, and this happened during an emergency, you need to prioritize. There is no formula... everything happened very quickly, with political pressure and everyone pushing, and we made it work.”
The Limits of Partnership: A Critical Look
Framing this as a smoothly functioning hybrid model risks overlooking real unevenness. Four limits stand out, drawing on the accounts of the stakeholders involved and pointing to areas for future research.
Coordination. A hybrid emergency model built on hundreds of actors merits particular scrutiny here. Whether shelter and aid actually reach displaced populations at the same rate everywhere depends less on how many organizations are involved than on how consistently they are steered toward the same standards, and that is hard to verify.
Officials describe a clear intent on this front. Asked about the government's relationship with NGOs, a MOSA official was clear that the ministry sees itself as setting the terms of partnership: “As a government, we don't want to replace the role of NGOs; we cannot, and we don't want this. We want to work with them, but we set the standards and oversee implementation, and the services that are needed are being provided.” On the scale of the challenge, the official pointed to sheer numbers: the ministry is coordinating with roughly 20 UN agencies, several other government ministries, and a few hundred NGOs simultaneously, with health, education, and MOSA staff describing themselves as working around the clock since the crisis began. This captures something real: standard-setting and oversight, even without matching funds, is a meaningful form of state capacity, and coordinating that many actors at once is no trivial workload. But it also leaves the harder question open. Answering whether that coordination reaches every region and community evenly, or concentrates in some areas more than others, would require further research; the kind of shelter-by-shelter or region-by-region data needed is not yet available. One practical step, if not done yet, would be to embed shelter- and region-level indicators within Lebanon's existing social registries, building over time toward a single registry that can support evidence-based monitoring across programs and actors, rather than reconstructing it case by case for each new emergency.
Sustainability versus improvisation. Evidently, a model built on rapid, repeated emergency mobilization and coordination among ministries, international and local NGOs, and UN agencies is not the same as institutionalized social protection. Treating it as a template risks recommending that donor and institutional actors formalize dependence on unpaid, unevenly distributed civic labor, rather than closing the state's structural funding gap. Resilience achieved this way carries real costs, for the people sustaining it, and for the predictability of aid over the course of a protracted conflict.
Accountability gaps exist in a makeshift system. Diaspora-funded projects and independent aid groups have different levels of financial transparency and oversight. These aid flows often follow personal and community networks, influenced by sectarian and social factors as much as by need, but confirming this would need more research.
The social contract involves more than just service delivery; it also affects the relationship between citizens and the state. Trust in government institutions develops through consistent experiences of receiving services directly from them. When these services are delivered by NGOs, UN agencies, or diaspora groups, even when coordinated with the government, the visibility and legitimacy of the state decrease, despite behind-the-scenes oversight. This isn't an argument against using a hybrid model temporarily, nor implying that MOSA or municipal authorities want to pass off responsibility. Instead, it shows active coordination. However, for long-term legitimacy, the model should be presented as temporary, with a clear plan to return to direct state delivery when finances improve, rather than as a permanent substitute.
Voices from the Ground: A Conversation with MOSA
The MOSA official described the state’s relationship with NGOs as based on three main areas. First, social assistance is provided through cash-based safety nets like AMAN, the ESSN, and related programs, all disbursed as cash rather than in-kind support. Second, MOSA directly contracts NGOs to deliver services to women and children, and these NGOs continued their work throughout the war. Third, MOSA coordinated efforts during the war, with the Minister of Social Affairs leading the response for the government and coordinating various priorities, including the Lebanon Response Plan.
The LRP, the official explained, was initiated in 2014 in response to the Syrian displacement crisis and is chaired by the Minister of Social Affairs, bringing together major UN agencies and donor representatives who meet on a near-daily basis. Funding channeled through OCHA’s flash appeals is prioritized by the minister according to assessed need, organized sector by sector: WASH, education, health, food and shelter, and protection. Other state bodies handle direct disbursement – the Council of the South, the Ministry of Public Health, and the Higher Relief Commission among them – while MOSA’s own role was to coordinate rather than spend the funds directly; the appeals themselves were channeled through the LRP.
On the ministry’s preference for cash: “Cash is the future of any humanitarian response, it goes directly from MOSA to the citizen, and people buy their needs.” This view echoes an influential strand of the humanitarian literature, which has argued that cash transfers, where feasible, tend to be timelier, more cost-efficient, and more dignified for recipients than in-kind assistance.
This argument was mainly made in stable currency contexts and doesn't easily apply to a hyper-inflationary economy like Lebanon's, where the pound has lost most of its value since 2019. Cash in local currency can lose purchasing power between disbursement and use; even dollarized or dollar-linked transfers expose recipients to a volatile, poorly regulated market for food, fuel, and housing. This doesn't negate cash's benefits in dignity, choice, and administrative ease over in-kind aid, but it shows the case for cash can't be simply transferred from more stable settings. Maintaining those benefits while protecting recipients from currency and market risks likely requires specific strategies, such as indexation, more frequent disbursements, or a hybrid approach combining cash with price monitoring, rather than assuming cash is automatically sufficient once transferred.
Regarding the cash safety nets, the official explained that roles are clearly divided. MOSA manages registration and selection and collaborates with about 17 implementing partners, including WFP and Mercy Corps, through a data-sharing agreement that covers personal information. “This clarifies responsibility,” the official said, noting the arrangement is managed by a joint cash working group led by MOSA. Registrants provide consent to share their data, with about 97% agreeing at registration. MOSA then supplies partner lists of beneficiaries, and each partner conducts its own validation process with the ministry before distributing aid and reporting the amounts given and recipients. “This cycle works together toward a common goal,” the official added.
A similar model governs in-kind distribution, such as hygiene kits. MOSA tracks population figures at each shelter and shares that data with the WASH sector, which handles targeting: coordinating with partners and covering all shelters and geographies nationwide on a 30-day cycle. Food distribution follows the same structure. Each sector applies its own quality control, the official said, with MOSA setting specifications that partners must meet when procuring supplies. On the ground, every shelter has an on-site MOSA and education-sector presence, and any protection or service issues are first reported to MOSA through shelter management.
Read together, MOSA's own account describes a program built substantially around emergency and near-emergency cash instruments – AMAN, the ESSN, and the WASH and food-distribution cycles run with partners – rather than a permanent, rights-based social security architecture into which displaced and vulnerable populations are enrolled as a matter of entitlement. That distinction matters for how the current cash-heavy model should be understood.
Localized, donor-funded cash injections are best read as emergency shock absorbers, valuable precisely because they can be stood up quickly and moved flexibly, rather than as the end point of social protection reform. Their comparative advantage lies in creating the fiscal and administrative space in which a more institutionalized, rights-based social framework could eventually be built, one that does not depend, year to year, on the scale of a particular flash appeal or the willingness of a particular set of donors.
Toward a More Systematic Account
The existing literature on social protection in Lebanon has tended to focus on fragmented state capacity in social assistance programs. Other work has examined how social assistance varies across geography and nationality, and a smaller body of research has begun to trace how municipal and grassroots organizations have stepped in to provide assistance where the state could not. Much of this literature remains anchored in the fragmentation exposed by the 2019 economic collapse, without fully capturing how state and municipal actors have adapted their coordination role during the 2024-2026 wars. That literature is not wrong about the shortcomings – the funding gap alone confirms them – but it has had less to say about the specific mechanisms through which government and grassroots capacity have been stitched together since 2024, and about where those stitches hold and where they do not.
Filling that gap matters beyond Lebanon, both for the literature on social assistance and protection and in practice. If state-provided infrastructure paired with community-driven service delivery is to be recommended as a model for other states facing protracted conflict and constrained budgets, it needs to be described with its accountability gaps and distributional unevenness intact, not only its efficiencies. Donors and international institutions weighing continued or expanded support should ask not just whether the hybrid model works, but for whom it works least well, and what formalized coordination, of the kind MOSA and its NGO partners may already be building in practice, would need to look like to close those gaps. The recommendations below set out some of the concrete, near-term steps that could begin to do so.
Policy Recommendations
The analysis above points toward a set of concrete, near-term steps for the government bodies, donors, and international actors best placed to act on them. None requires dismantling the hybrid model; each aims to ensure it functions as a bridge to stronger state capacity rather than a permanent substitute.
For MOSA and Line Ministries
- Formally frame the hybrid coordination model as transitional, with a published pathway and indicative timeline for rebuilding direct state service delivery as fiscal conditions allow, rather than leaving its duration open-ended.
- Embed shelter- and region-level monitoring indicators within existing social registries, as a step toward a single national registry that can support evidence-based targeting across programs and actors.
- Where feasible, pair cash disbursements with mechanisms that protect recipients from currency and price volatility – such as indexation, shortened disbursement cycles, or price-monitored cash-plus modalities – so that the advantages of cash are not eroded by Lebanon's inflationary environment.
- Publish standardized financial-transparency requirements for NGOs and diaspora-linked initiatives operating within government-designated shelters, to narrow the accountability gap between formally contracted partners and looser coordination arrangements.
For the Prime Minister's Office and the Council of Ministers
- If not yet implemented, a task for a cross-ministerial body, building on the existing Lebanon Response Plan coordination structure, to define, in consultation with MOSA, what an institutionalized, rights-based social protection system would require in fiscal, legal, and administrative terms.
- Pursue reforms to domestic resource mobilization, including tax and revenue collection, to reduce structural dependence on external and diaspora financing over the medium term.
For Donors and International Financial Institutions
- Commit predictable financing to institution-building, including registries, ministry capacity, and social protection systems, alongside emergency response funding, so that cash transfers and shelter support function as a bridge rather than a permanent substitute.
- Support research and data that can answer, region by region and shelter by shelter, whether coordination and aid delivery are reaching populations evenly.
- Revisit financing and debt arrangements with Lebanon in light of the weak tax base and the untaxed remittance flows currently substituting for state and donor spending, recognizing that addressing this is as much a structural finance question as a humanitarian one.
The views represented in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Arab Reform Initiative, its staff, or its board.
