27 | FMR 74 Beyond indicators: lessons from fnancing the Jordan Compact The Jordan Compact, 1 announced in early 2016, was hailed as a transformative approach to refugee livelihoods in protracted displacement. It promised to provide about 200,000 job opportunities for Syrian refugees in Jordan, and to turn the Syrian refugee crisis into a ‘development opportunity’. In exchange for facilitating Syrian refugees’ access to the formal labour market, Jordan would receive signifcant additional donor fnancing to support its hosting of over 650,000 registered Syrian refugees. One key assumption driving the implementation of the Compact was that formalising refugee livelihoods would bring a range of benefts to refugees, including more stable work and better working conditions, thus increasing Syrian refugees’ self-reliance. Research has highlighted the Compact’s key challenges and limitations, including how the Jordanian context and the perspectives of local experts, including refugees, were neglected in policy design, and the limited integration of a human rights or a labour rights perspective. It has also demonstrated the modest changes the Compact offered Syrians, its effects on other marginalised workers, and the very limited achievements of its high-profle trade reforms. But there has been much less focus on the Compact’s fnancing, and the effects this has had on how it played out. At the heart of the Compact was a World Bank Program for Results (P4R), which was supported by the Global Concessional Financing Facility 2 (GCFF), initially worth up to USD 300 million (and later increased to USD 400 million). P4R is a lending instrument frst adopted by the World Bank in 2012, in which the Bank and recipient government agree on performance indicators and funds are disbursed according to the extent to which these indicators are achieved. P4R is still relatively new within forced displacement response. The Jordan Compact P4R programme, which ended in January 2024, offers an important opportunity to understand its role in fnancing responses to displacement. While, according to UNHCR, 3 the Compact puts Jordan “at the forefront of global efforts to give both refugees and host communities access to decent work,” many practitioners in Jordan now express both unease and disillusionment about the impact of the Compact. Our own research demonstrates that the P4R’s focus on easily quantifable indicators as a means to advance labour formalisation is a crucial reason why the Compact has led to only modest changes in Syrian refugees’ working lives. 4 The limits of indicator-oriented formalisation Questions surround the effect of the ostensibly impressive number of work Katharina Lenner and Lewis Turner The Jordan Compact promised ‘win-win’ solutions for Syrians and the Jordanian government, allowing Syrians to work and boosting Jordan’s economy. However, the Compact’s fnancing structures have led to limited change for Syrian refugees.