Attachments
Introduction
This Compendium of Best Practices is a component of the Lebanon Crisis Response Plan (LCRP) 2017 – 2021 Strategic Review. The LCRP strategic review was commissioned in early 2021, in order to reflect on achievements over the past 4 years and to learn from the LCRP’s successful and less successful experiences. It was planned as a strategic review, rather than an evaluation, so that it could provide useable insights and recommendations quickly enough to inform the design of the future response to the impact of the Syria crisis. While the Compendium of Best Practices was part of the strategic review overall, it followed its own participatory process strongly leaning on the LCRP’s architecture, and benefiting from the knowledge of the organisations and people who participate in LCRP delivery.
The purpose of the Compendium of Best Practices was to identify and record best practices, in order to inform the design of the future response to the impact of the Syria crisis, and to stimulate scaling-up and replication of proven approaches and practices. Originally, the compendium was designed to include lessons learnt. However, all selected submissions constitute best practices.
The majority of the LCRP’s best practices showcased in this compendium are innovative solutions building on or driven by Lebanon’s unique context. Nevertheless, they show a high degree of replicability, certainly within Lebanon, and in other countries. Replication in other countries may be based on underlying principles of these approaches, methods and models, and by adapting to the local contexts. Importantly, the majority of these best practices brought out by the LCRP can be integrated into other crisis responses in Lebanon.
The LCRP’s best practices contained in this compendium underline some of the findings of the LCRP Strategic Review: Sustainability is constrained by the combination of policy and regulatory limitations, limited absorption capacity of already strained public institutions and a continuously worsening situation.
Nevertheless, creative ways of anchoring sustainability for example in communities are included in these best practices. Secondly, due to the lack of thorough impact assessment, the impact of the LCRP’s best practices is unclear with the exception of cash programming.
While the majority of the featured best practices involve Lebanese organisations to some degree, on two of the best practices are solely designed and implemented by Lebanese organisations. This in itself highlights the need to dedicate more work to localisation in Lebanon. The two Lebanese practices showcased here present ways to embed interventions in local communities thus integrating sustainability measures.
Finally, more than half of the best practices from the past five years of implementing the LCRP are multisectoral approaches, contrasting the LCRP’s sectoral set-up.