Cash Transfer and Humanitarian Assistance

Abstract

In this chapter, we turn our attention to cash transfer (CT) as an instrument of humanitarian assistance for forced migrants in Turkey. We first consider the emergence of CT as a priority instrument for humanitarian assistance in the twenty-first century. We then sketch the political background of humanitarian assistance in Turkey for persons displaced by internal conflicts in Syria focusing in particular on the EU–Turkey agreements that led to the establishment of the Facility for Refugees in Turkey (FRiT) in 2016. In a final section we focus on the establishment as part of FRiT of the Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN), the largest humanitarian CT program ever established by the European Union. We discuss in particular the program’s institutional complexity and the resulting risk of ambiguous consensus and conflicts of interest among the agencies involved in its design and implementation.