February 10, 2026
Lama Mourad
Lama Mourad is an assistant professor at the Norman
Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University. Her
research focuses on the intersection of forced migration, local
governance, and the politics of borders, with a regional focus on the
Middle East. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Perry World
House, University of Pennsylvania, and a SSHRC-postdoctoral fellow at
Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania. Her research has been
supported by a number of institutions and agencies, including the
Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative, the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council, the International Development Research
Centre (IDRC), the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and a University of
Toronto Chancellor’s Fellowship, as well as by project and
issue-specific grants from the Project on Middle Eastern Political
Science (POMEPS), and the American Political Science Association’s First
Generation Scholar’s Initiative. Her work has been published in both
academic and public outlets, including the Journal of Refugee Studies,
Middle East Law and Governance, Forced Migration Studies, the European
Journal of International Relations as well as The Atlantic, Lawfare, The
Washington Post, The Toronto Star, and Le Devoir.
Arabic version
To say that Lebanon’s municipalities sit at the frontline of overlapping crises has become an almost too-familiar refrain. Since 2019, the country has faced a devastating financial collapse, the 2020 Beirut port explosion, and a war that since 2023 has displaced more than a quarter of the population and destroyed hundreds of villages, poisoned agricultural lands, and destroyed livelihoods. These shocks have intensified pressures on an already fragile set of institutions and on municipalities that must provide services under conditions of extreme resource scarcity.
Despite these pressures and limited direct resources well prior to these current crises, municipalities have remained the first point of contact for many citizens during the crisis, and they continue to command comparatively high levels of public trust. Municipalities in the country have long suffered from unreliable and inconsistent access to fiscal resources, intervention from the central state, and challenges to sustainable service delivery, among other challenges.
Over the course of the last decade, and in particular as a result of the Syrian refugee crisis, municipalities have become adept at engaging with and courting international aid funding, which has sustained many core services across the country. More recently, however, two distinct and separate transformations in the financing landscape have once again unsettled modes of development and governance across Lebanon’s municipalities. First is the retreat of traditional political parties as funding channels. This is of course profoundly the case in municipalities and towns in the south and the Beqaa, which have not only suffered major losses over the last two years but whose traditional parties are no longer able to play a major role in local development, reconstruction, and service provision. But while the challenges facing these municipalities are undeniably deeper, the broader pattern of political party retreat can be seen in other regions as well, where parties such as the Future Movement or the Free Patriotic Movement - historically very effective in raising and distributing resources - are playing a lesser role in this regard. Second is the retreat of global donors, due to a number of factors including donor fatigue, the reverberations of the gutting of USAID, as well as the increased focus on defense funding globally.
Against this backdrop, diaspora engagement has become ever more significant. The Lebanese diaspora has long sustained the country through remittances that supported household consumption. With a diaspora estimated to be at least twice the size of its domestic population, remittances already accounted for 15–20% of GDP even before the current crisis. Yet recent trends suggest a shift: beyond sustaining families, diaspora actors are investing in collective initiatives that sustain entire communities. From supporting schools and clinics to funding water and sanitation projects, these contributions increasingly resemble forms of local governance in their own right.
Research by the Danish Refugee Council (2024) shows that municipalities are relying more on diaspora-funded projects to fill basic service gaps but also to expand employment opportunities and develop local businesses. These are not isolated acts of generosity but reflect a growing pattern of transnational engagement that is increasingly organized and serves to enhance public goods provision and crisis recovery. Diaspora networks were also heavily mobilized after the Beirut blast and during the economic collapse, leveraging transnational ties to provide support that international donors struggled to deliver. In many cases, diaspora initiatives have proven more nimble and responsive than formal aid channels, though issues persist with regards to both transparency and effectiveness of distribution especially in cases such as the port blast where the funds raised overwhelmed the capacity of local NGOs.
In this broader context, even limited diaspora interventions can carry significant weight - not only by delivering material assistance but by influencing perceptions of who governs, who is legitimate, and how authority is distributed. Municipal actors are also not passive recipients of these transnational overtures: they may seek out diaspora partnerships, broker access to local networks, or push back against perceived encroachments on their autonomy. These interactions are deeply political, and they are unfolding in a governance vacuum where traditional hierarchies of state and international authority are being renegotiated.
Recent research on municipal improvisation and reconstruction deepens this picture (Zoughaib, et al. 2025). Local leaders are “coping through entrepreneurship,” relying on improvisation and targeted networks to deliver even modest projects. In many cases, these networks explicitly included diaspora communities. Diaspora resources, activated through personal and political ties, have become one of the key levers mayors could pull when state institutions and international donors either could not or would not deliver.
This illustrates that diaspora engagement is not a separate track but increasingly a constitutive part of the entrepreneurial strategies through which local leaders govern in crisis. Mayors, municipal council members, and even informal leaders draw on these ties as one of the few reliable sources of financing for infrastructure and services. In the process, they transform diaspora remittances from household safety nets into community-level investments that redefine what it means to govern locally in Lebanon today.
From my own field experience, a telling example comes from a small municipality in southern Lebanon where an expatriate financed the construction of a public water pump and well. This project directly addressed a structural need that neither the state nor international donors were positioned to meet. It also reshaped local expectations, positioning diaspora contributions as central to the provision of essential services.
Yet, as with other forms of entrepreneurial localism, diaspora-led interventions remain precarious. They are often personality-driven, dependent on mayors with the right connections abroad or expatriates with sufficient means and interest. Projects may be highly visible - a restored water source, a rehabilitated street, a renovated market - but they are rarely embedded in long-term planning or backed by the institutional frameworks required for sustainability. Like donor-driven interventions, diaspora-funded projects can risk reinforcing fragmentation, with municipalities competing for external resources rather than building cooperative frameworks.
Still, diaspora engagement has distinctive features that set it apart from international aid. Unlike donor programs, diaspora funding is less constrained by thematic priorities or bureaucratic procedures. It can be faster, more flexible, and more attuned to community needs. But it can also carry with it the imprint of sectarian, partisan, or familial priorities, raising questions about inclusivity and accountability. Municipal leaders, for their part, may strategically embrace or resist diaspora offers depending on how they align with local power configurations.
Diaspora Funding as Political Infrastructure
These dynamics raise deeper questions not just about project delivery, but about the medium- and long-term structures of power being shaped in their wake. Diaspora contributions - who mobilizes them, through what networks, and toward which ends - are rarely neutral. They reflect and reinforce existing political configurations, and at times, establish new ones.
In some municipalities, the ability of a mayor to "go to the diaspora" is a form of political capital - one that distinguishes effective governance not by institutional strength, but by personal transnational reach. This creates a new terrain of legitimacy: leadership is earned not through formal planning or accountability, but through visible results delivered via external channels.
Funding infrastructures - whether organized through partisan transnational wings, hometown associations, or individual benefactors - thus become critical to understanding local political economy. They shape who gets to lead, who gets to deliver, and who is seen as credible. These aren’t temporary stopgaps; they have the potential to reconfigure the foundational logics of municipal power in Lebanon.
Between Aid and Patronage: Rethinking the Comparative Frame
Comparisons between international aid and diaspora funding bring forward significant differences in scale, speed, and flexibility. But just as critical are their political logics. Donor-funded development projects typically operate through formal mechanisms, with clear conditions, accountability frameworks, and thematic restrictions - such as a focus on refugees, renewable energy, gender inclusion, or transparency metrics. These agendas, while they may be laudable, can distort local priorities or produce shallow compliance rather than deep institutional change.
Diaspora-funded projects, by contrast, can be more responsive to immediate needs and locally rooted concerns. A diaspora engineer from Australia might fund a school renovation in her village; a group of expatriates in West Africa may coordinate water delivery to their hometown. These interventions bypass bureaucratic delays and donor conditionalities, allowing for tailored solutions. But they also tend to operate outside of formal oversight, planning frameworks, or transparent distribution systems. Their strength - their personal, affective, and fast-moving nature - can also be their limitation.
Moving beyond the contrast of international, on the one hand, and diasporic (or transnational), on the other, this moment provides an opportunity to understand how different forms of transnational engagement interact with pre-existing local governance dynamics. For instance, how does diaspora challenge or exacerbate extant issues of accountability that are structurally embedded within Lebanon’s municipal structure? In 80% of Lebanon’s municipalities, the majority of voters do not reside in the locality within which they are registered and have the right to vote .This already poses a major issue for local responsiveness, whereby the electoral fates of municipal councils are not determined by the constituents whose lives they most directly impact. While diaspora residents cannot vote in municipal elections from abroad, their ability to impact local elections and governance may be shaped by their local investments.
This has the potential to also exacerbate regional inequality, on the basis of which regions have stronger and more resource-rich diasporas. In municipalities where mayors have strong sectarian or partisan connections abroad, funds may flow more abundantly. In others, particularly those without large emigrant communities or well-connected political brokers, projects may stall altogether. This may work to reinforce uneven geographies of support and exclusion, where some communities are flush with transnational support while others remain isolated.
In some cases, diaspora may also mimic the logics of patronage, while in other cases, they may rely on more collective organization and broader accountability. Projects may be directed to the mayor’s family neighborhood, or prioritized in exchange for electoral loyalty or symbolic returns - naming rights, public recognition, or informal influence. As a result, diaspora funding can entrench, rather than upend, local configurations of power.
This tension mirrors wider critiques of both international aid and diaspora: that each can distort governance and accountability in their own ways. But while aid agencies often tout participatory mechanisms and safeguard structures, they are increasingly constrained by donor fatigue and geopolitical shifts. As international funding contracts, diaspora flows are filling a widening vacuum - but without the institutional anchors or planning mandates that state or donor programs (at least in theory) uphold.
Understanding this comparative terrain matters. It helps illuminate the political stakes of relying on diaspora networks for service delivery and governance. Rather than idealizing diaspora funding as more authentic or efficient, or dismissing donor aid as rigid and irrelevant, we must analyze how both reshape the infrastructures - and inequities - of local power.
As Lebanon navigates its profound instability, these questions become central. Diaspora actors are not simply filling gaps left by the state or international donors; their contributions have the potential to reshape the political and social fabric of local governance. Understanding these shifts offers a window into how crisis-affected states adapt, and how transnational ties reconfigure power, legitimacy, and inequality - both within communities and across regions.