More than 4.7 million refugees have fled Syria, most of them to neighbouring countries including Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. With 10% of Syrian refugees currently residing in camps, host governments and aid agencies have had to rethink conventional refugee assistance programmes designed for camp-based responses.

The lives and livelihoods of Syrian refugees: a study of refugee perspectives and their institutional environment in Turkey and Jordan aims to generate better understanding of the lives and livelihoods of Syrian refugees living outside refugee camps in Turkey and Jordan, with a view to finding ways to better support their livelihoods. In doing so, it aims to identify opportunities to support refugees’ livelihoods through a better understanding of their perspectives and interactions with the many networks, institutions and individuals that shape their livelihoods. This report also tackles some of these challenges by exploring the lives and livelihoods of refugees in two distinct research phases.

In the first phase, the report recreates with refugees their ‘displacement life history’ in order to understand how their aims, strategies, actions and livelihoods have changed during their displacement, tackling these elements from the perspective of refugees. In the second phase, the report explores the networks and institutions, including host communities, government and local and international organisations, that refugees have engaged with, and the factors that shape this interaction and its outcomes for refugee livelihoods, tackling these from the perspective of the many actors shaping refugee livelihoods.