The Impact of the Policy Environment on the Role of Humanitarian Coalition Actors in Sri Lanka’s Refugee Policy Subsystem
From independence until 2005, the Sri Lankan government managed refugees and asylum seekers under the Immigrants and Emigrants Act No. 20 of 1948, which classified asylum seekers and refugees as irregular immigrants, rendering them vulnerable to arrest, detention, and deportation. The “Memorandum of Understanding – 2005” signed by the Government of Sri Lanka and UNHCR was the first legal document to allow refugees and asylum seekers to remain legally in Sri Lanka temporarily until resettlement in a third country. Therefore, since 2005, Sri Lanka has provided temporary shelter to refugees. However, from 2005 to 2025, two broad groups of actors with different policy goals can be identified within Sri Lanka’s refugee policy subsystem. One coalition primarily focused on protecting the humanitarian rights of refugees, while the other emphasized national security and border management. The main objective of this study is to examine how the policy environment shapes the role of humanitarian coalition actors within the refugee policy subsystem in Sri Lanka. To address this objective, the study used the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) as its primary theoretical framework. Focusing on the period from 2005 to 2025, the study adopts a social constructivist and interpretivist approach, recognizing that social realities are shaped by human experiences, interactions, historical contexts, and institutional practices. In Sri Lanka's refugee policy context, concepts such as “refugee,” “protection,” and “state responsibility” are socially constructed through political narratives, historical experiences, legal contexts, sovereignty concerns, and the experiences of various policy actors. This approach allows the researcher to analyze how humanitarian coalition actors construct, negotiate, and interpret refugee-related issues within policy communities and advocacy coalitions over time. Also, as indicated above, this study adopts a longitudinal single-case study design spanning 2005 to 2025, divided into three periods: 2005–2013, 2014–2022, and 2023–2025. The rationale for using a longitudinal study is that it aims to examine policy developments over an extended period, while the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), as a public policy theory, is particularly well-suited to analyzing policy subsystems that evolve over more than a decade. Therefore, both the research objectives and the theoretical lens require a methodological approach that can capture changes and developments over an extended period. Accordingly, adopting a longitudinal research design enables the study to examine how humanitarian actors, coalitions, beliefs, strategies, and policy dynamics change over time in response to the policy environment. To enhance the validity of the findings, data triangulation is employed by combining primary and secondary data sources. Accordingly, the study conducted 20 semi-structured interviews to collect primary data, along with secondary data from books, journal articles, websites, etc. The interview was conducted with actors in both humanitarian and security coalitions to verify their involvement since 2005. Purposive sampling was initially used to identify key actors, followed by snowball sampling to reach additional participants who were difficult to identify or access, particularly because of the sensitive nature of refugee policy and the changing involvement of organizations over the 2005–2025 period. Finally, the findings from NVivo-assisted thematic analysis revealed that external events in the policy environment significantly influenced the roles of the humanitarian coalition's actors in Sri Lanka’s refugee policy subsystem, more than other policy-environment factors.