Coordination Mechanisms Across Refugee-Led and Community-Based Networks in Thailand and Malaysia
Kunanyaporn Jirasamatakij, Global Advocacy and Communications Officer, Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) and Deputy Chair, Legal Aid and Advocacy Working Group, Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN)
Thailand and Malaysia are significant transit and destination countries within regional mixed movements involving people experiencing protracted displacement. In both contexts, refugee protection operates through fragmented coordination across multiple legal, institutional, and jurisdictional frameworks, shaping uneven access to services and protection outcomes. In this environment, humanitarian organizations, refugee-led organizations (RLOs), and community-based networks serve as key operational actors, linking otherwise segmented service delivery systems. Across both contexts, RLOs and community-based actors emerge as key mechanisms that enable operational linkages within fragmented protection and assistance systems, thereby sustaining continuity within otherwise disconnected service environments.
In practice, RLOs often help ensure that people do not fall through the gaps in these fragmented systems by connecting displaced persons to information, services, and formal protection actors. Recent cuts in humanitarian funding across the region have weakened service providers and coordination systems, leading to fewer available services, uneven organizational capacity, and more gaps in protection and assistance.
Against this backdrop, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Route-Based Approach emphasizes coordinated, protection-sensitive responses along displacement routes, including stronger referral systems, community-based monitoring, and meaningful participation by people with lived experience. Building on this framing, this essay draws on practitioner observations of how protection and assistance systems function across UNHCR, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), refugee-led organizations (RLOs), and community-based organizations (CBOs) in Thailand and Malaysia, focusing on how continuity is sustained in practice and on the structural conditions that produce gaps and opportunities within restrictive legal environments and resource-constrained humanitarian settings.
In this essay, continuity refers to the sustained progression of individuals through referral processes, case engagement, and service linkages across multiple providers within otherwise disconnected protection and assistance systems.
Methodology and Scope
This essay draws on qualitative semi-structured interviews with five humanitarian practitioners working across refugee protection, mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS), advocacy, community engagement, and case management in Thailand and Malaysia. The interviews explored operational experiences of referral coordination and community-based responses, as well as the impact of humanitarian funding reductions on route-based protection and service delivery pathways.
Given the operational sensitivity of the subject matter and the professional positions of interviewees, all respondents are fully anonymized to ensure confidentiality. The findings are exploratory and practitioner-informed, not statistically representative. Given the limited sample size and qualitative design, the essay does not seek to generalize across refugee response contexts in Thailand and Malaysia. Instead, it identifies recurring operational patterns and coordination challenges relevant to ongoing discussions on route-based approaches. Importantly, the methodology enables an interpretive analysis of how continuity is produced in practice through coordination dynamics, rather than an assessment of formalized coordination arrangements, where they exist, or of their performance.
Operational Dynamics of Protection Coordination and Community-Based Actors
Thailand
In Thailand, practitioners described protection coordination as highly decentralized, with service continuity often dependent on informal communication channels, personal networks, and long-standing inter-organizational relationships. In practice, frontline protection actors often coordinate directly with individual caseworkers via phone calls or messaging apps to confirm service availability and facilitate referrals, in the absence of an interoperable case management system.
Practitioners further described how individuals with intersecting vulnerabilities, including risks of detention and deportation, housing insecurity, emotional distress, and urgent medical or protection needs, as well as cases involving gender-based violence and unaccompanied or separated children, may be referred across multiple organizations before receiving appropriate support, often requiring repeated case assessment interviews across different service providers. RLOs can help bridge these gaps, particularly when formal referral pathways are delayed or difficult to navigate. In addition, high caseload pressure within service-providing organizations, including reduced staffing for refugee status determination-related support, contributes to prolonged processing times and extended waiting periods for applicants seeking status determination.
These operational and procedural constraints are closely linked to broader uncertainty about protection pathways and access to basic services and assistance, particularly amid the evolving implementation of the National Screening Mechanism (NSM). Several respondents also noted unclear implications of the NSM, alongside existing migrant worker pathways, for eligibility for or access to third-country resettlement.
Community-based actors within religious and ethnic community networks, including church- and mosque-linked groups, also play an important role in supporting newly arrived asylum seekers and displaced persons. These networks rely on established internal communication channels for sharing information and resources. Alongside reduced NGO services following recent funding cuts, community-based mechanisms have become increasingly important in bridging immediate gaps in assistance, despite operating under increasingly constrained and precarious resource conditions.
Malaysia
In Malaysia, protection and referral systems face several operational constraints, particularly where access to services depends on relationship-based connections. Once asylum-seekers or refugees approach an organization, delays may occur before formal casework begins, creating a gap during which only limited interim accompaniment is available to sustain engagement and prevent service disruption.
Within these constraints, RLOs and community-based actors play a central role in localized protection and service delivery, including translation, accompaniment during online asylum applications, emergency accommodation support, information sharing, and referrals to NGOs. These functions position RLOs as an important bridge between displaced communities and formal humanitarian services, particularly when formal casework or referrals are delayed. In some contexts, they also provide informal peer-based psychosocial support for young people experiencing emotional distress or trauma-related reactions. While these practices enable immediate, accessible assistance, they also reveal limitations in addressing more complex mental health and psychosocial needs, underscoring the need for stronger technical guidance, capacity building, and safeguarding frameworks to appropriately scope community-based MHPSS.
Despite their central role, RLOs operate under significant resource and capacity constraints, often without formal institutional support, technical resources, or safeguarding training, leaving support largely informal and dependent on individual commitment rather than institutional systems. These conditions indicate that continuity in Malaysia is sustained through decentralized coordination mechanisms embedded in relationship-based access pathways and informal community support, but remains structurally unsupported and dependent on the uneven capacity of refugee-led and community-based actors.
Implications for Policy and Practice
The findings highlight distinct yet complementary challenges in Thailand and Malaysia, shaped by differing governance environments that influence protection arrangements, referral pathways, and access to services. Across both contexts, refugee-led organizations and community-based actors emerge as key components within fragmented protection and assistance systems, helping to sustain continuity across otherwise disconnected service environments. These findings point to several implications for policy and practice, focusing on strengthening and better supporting existing coordination mechanisms.
In Thailand, three interrelated issues emerge. First, referral practices need greater consistency across humanitarian actors, particularly through NGO coordination mechanisms, to reduce variability in service delivery and improve continuity of assistance. This could be supported through a centralized case management system with a shared referral platform, where, with informed consent, providers can enter and access standardized case records, including basic assessments, vulnerability criteria profiles, service history, referrals made, and outcomes across sectors such as healthcare, legal assistance, education, psychosocial support, shelter, food, and financial assistance. The system would enable receiving agencies to review prior assistance and needs assessments, reducing repeated intake and improving referral speed. Its implementation would require agreed case categories, defined user access levels, and procedures for obtaining and periodically renewing consent.
Second, refugee-led organizations (RLOs) are key first points of contact for newly arrived refugees, providing immediate assistance, trusted information, and service navigation. Their role should therefore be recognized as part of the wider protection system, rather than as a supplementary function. This highlights the need to strengthen locally embedded protection capacities. Priority measures include NGO-led capacity strengthening to support RLOs in program design, proposal development, and resource mobilization, thereby enhancing their longer-term sustainability. At the same time, donors need to adopt more flexible funding requirements and expand direct funding channels to RLOs.
Third, refugee protection should be strengthened by situating responses within broader structural conditions, including demographic change and labor market dynamics such as aging populations and labor shortages linked to shifts in migrant worker availability. This includes recognizing the potential role of refugee rights to work as both a protection and a socio-economic measure. In addition, efforts are needed to address persistent barriers to accessing essential services, including education and health, which remain uneven in practice due to gaps between policy intent and implementation and operational constraints such as documentation requirements, language barriers, and limited interpreter support.
In Malaysia, three interrelated issues emerge. First, strengthening public and institutional understanding of refugee protection is a prerequisite for consistent access to services, including awareness of protection needs, displacement drivers, and constraints faced in both the country of origin and the host country. Limited understanding of refugee conditions continues to shape frontline decision-making, including referral behavior and engagement with displaced persons, reflecting broader gaps in public and institutional awareness of what “refugee” status entails and the associated protection needs.
Second, refugee-led organizations require support to address the basic needs of RLO members in contexts where formal employment is restricted, including livelihood insecurity, limited or unstable income, limited access to social protection, and barriers to essential services such as healthcare and education. There is also a need for psychosocial support and duty of care measures to safeguard psychosocial well-being and reduce secondary traumatic stress in their role as frontline community responders. Relevant measures may include peer support mechanisms, skills training, and access to individual counseling services, as needed.
Finally, across Thailand and Malaysia, the findings point to the need for a stronger people-centric approach within protection and referral systems. Grounded in the principles of equality and non-discrimination, participation and inclusion, and accountability, such an approach requires greater attention to the uneven conditions affecting displaced persons’ ability to access services, exercise agency, and claim rights in practice. It also requires meaningful engagement of displaced persons not only as beneficiaries of assistance but also as rights-holders participating in decision-making processes that affect humanitarian interventions. Accountability further requires humanitarian and institutional actors, as duty bearers within protection systems, to ensure that referral mechanisms and service delivery arrangements respond effectively to protection needs without reproducing exclusion, shifting burdens onto affected communities, or reinforcing inequalities in access to safety, rights, and support.
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