EVALUATION OF UNHCR-LED INITIATIVES TO END STATELESSNESS – FINAL REPORT – VOLUME I questioned whether “top down” prioritization guidance would remain as influential. Moreover, the evaluation found that there is a gap in coordination of efforts on statelessness across different divisions and functions. At headquarters, the Senior Executive Team (SET) has a critical role to play in overall prioritization as well as for facilitating coordination across divisions. Despite early indications that the campaign was intended to be ‘co-owned’ by DIP and DER, many stakeholders felt that the campaign suffered from a lack of attention and prioritization by DER, due in part to inadequate personnel and budgets and a focus on emergencies, as well as the lack of knowledge and comfort level to communicate about statelessness. The new Division of Strategic Planning and Results in headquarters is starting to play an important role in supporting priority setting by Representatives, highlighting the importance of situation analysis across groups of PoC to inform multi-year plans, and ensuring that plans are aligned to the Global Strategic Priorities and follow other guidance for planning and budgeting. Regional Bureau Directors were cited as serving a key ‘tone-setting’ function for the staff within their bureau and for country operations under their responsibility and have major influence over allocating budget envelopes within their regions and approving country operations plans (and now strategies). In the end, the evaluation found that Country Representatives play the most critical roles of all, as the face of UNHCR with national governments and the most influential decision-makers regarding whether an operation will prioritize statelessness work. They determine the degree to which statelessness work is funded and staffed, and whether operations make substantial efforts to influence government decisions, build the awareness and capacity of partners and governments, and whether politically sensitive topics should be broached publicly, privately or not at all. The familiarity of Representatives with statelessness topics and comfort level in engaging key decision-makers plays an important part in determining whether UNHCR can overcome obstacles to progress and move forward with specific initiatives towards sustainable solutions to statelessness. To help operationalize work on GAP actions, the GSIP identifies UNHCR activities aligned to the 10 GAP actions for target countries. However, efforts to guide operations towards addressing GAP actions relevant in their country through the GSIP are commendable but have not always translated into inclusion of statelessness activities in operations’ plans and budgets. Changes to the Results Framework and RBM system are ongoing, and their potential influence on UNHCR’s statelessness work remains somewhat speculative. Some potential concerns raised by stakeholders include the planned elimination of the pillar structure for planning and budgeting and the intention to allow operations to link activities and budgets to more than one population group. Both of these potential changes have logical merit from a programming perspective, given numerous examples of activities and initiatives that support more than one population group, or where population groups overlap. The new Results Framework also offers clearer linkages to the SDGs. However, the evaluation expects that these changes may further complicate UNHCR’s ability to clearly demonstrate the link between resources and results for its statelessness work, potentially reducing transparency and accountability. UNHCR Investments in Ending Statelessness From 2012 to 2019 UNHCR invested just under USD 300 million in statelessness – with annual expenditure remaining relatively flat since the launch of the campaign in 2014. Budgets allocated for statelessness work represented an overall decrease in the overall organizational expenditure from 1.6 percent in 2012 to 0.9 percent in 2019. While expenditure for refugee programming increased proportional to the growth in the numbers of refugees globally, budgets for statelessness work did not increase as known stateless populations grew by 25 percent. Just 10 out of 83 UNHCR offices with statelessness budgets made up 62% of all statelessness expenditures from 2012- 2019, including Myanmar (18%) and the U.S. multi-country office, which covers the Dominican Republic (12%). Within statelessness budgets, the evaluation found that some GAP action areas received greater attention than others. Work on status determination procedures received the highest percentage of budget requests. Work to improve public attitudes towards persons of concern received 64% of funding requested and strengthening of law and policy received 63%. Other areas, such as work on individual documentation, civil registration and civil status documentation, and identification of statelessness cases received significantly less support. UNHCR / May, 2021 v