Listening before helping: Why community involvement is essential for peace in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh

Projects developed without meaningful local input risk overlooking grievances or reinforcing local inequalities

Originally published on Global Voices

A camp for Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Image via Flickr by Mohammad Tauheed. CC BY NC 2.0.

The article was first published in Peace News. An edited version is published below with permission.

The arrival of more than 1 million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh since 2017 has transformed the social and economic landscape of Cox’s Bazar district. International attention has largely focused on the urgent humanitarian needs of displaced populations living in a few dozen camps. Yet the experience of the surrounding host communities, who share land, resources, and economic spaces with refugees, reveals a need for international organizations to engage more deeply with host and refugee communities in Cox’s Bazar.

In places such as Teknaf, a municipality in Cox’s Bazar district in south-eastern Bangladesh, local residents say the pressure on livelihoods and social relations has grown steadily in recent years. UNDP Bangladesh Reports stated that rising living costs, shrinking day labor opportunities, and rumors about unequal aid distribution have contributed to tensions between refugees and host communities.

Abdur Rahim, who helps coordinate a small network of community volunteers in Teknaf, recalls how these concerns began to intensify during the early years of the Rohingya influx. The in-depth interview was conducted by the author in December 2025.

“Rumors spread quickly that refugees were receiving large amounts of assistance while local people were being left behind,” Rahim explained. “At the same time, prices for basic goods went up, and work opportunities became fewer.”

Recognizing the growing tensions, Rahim and other volunteers began organizing informal discussions in December 2025 between representatives from refugee and host communities as part of a locally organized voluntary initiative. The meetings, which continue to this day, were not always easy.

“At first, the conversations were tense, sometimes confrontational,” he said. “But gradually people began to understand each other’s situation.”

Over time, these dialogues helped produce practical compromises, informal arrangements about market access, more open communication between communities, and local channels for resolving disputes before they escalated. “Peace is not constructed in workshops,” Rahim said. “It develops through relationships.”

Initiatives like these often rely on the support of international aid programs. Donors and development agencies provide funding for youth initiatives, mediation training, civic education programs, and early warning systems designed to identify emerging conflicts. For example, a peacebuilding program implemented by UNICEF and funded by the European Union supported more than 20,500 adolescents and youth from the Rohingya and host communities in Cox’s Bazar through training, dialogue activities, and the establishment of youth social hubs.

In addition, youth resilience and social cohesion programs implemented by Save the Children in Cox’s Bazar have included structured youth engagement, training, and community-level interventions designed to strengthen resilience among both refugee and host communities.

Without such external support, many local organizations would struggle to sustain their activities.

International agencies also bring technical expertise and organizational resources that grassroots groups cannot always mobilize independently. Yet studies on humanitarian governance note that structural imbalances often limit the influence of local actors in decision-making processes.

Project frameworks are frequently designed in distant headquarters before meaningful consultation takes place with the communities where programs will be implemented, a challenge highlighted in several studies examining humanitarian governance and local participation.

International organizations typically must submit detailed proposals to donors months in advance, including measurable outcomes and strict implementation schedules, reflecting funding structures that emphasize predefined indicators and timelines.

In one union of Teknaf Upazila, tensions initially described by residents as religious disagreements were later linked to competition over market access and employment opportunities between host community vendors and refugee traders. In another locality in Cox’s Bazar district, concerns about youth radicalization were later found to be linked primarily to unemployment and limited access to vocational training and decision-making forums, issues widely documented in youth development assessments in the region.

“When the conflict analysis is too shallow, the solutions also remain superficial,” said a community organizer in Teknaf who requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of mediation work.

Local organizations often find themselves navigating a difficult balancing act between two forms of accountability. Studies on humanitarian accountability note that local organizations must respond to both donor reporting requirements and community expectations for meaningful outcomes.

A breakthrough may appear in subtle ways: A softened tone between rival community leaders, a shared meal after years of mistrust, or the quiet reopening of communication between neighbors. Similar outcomes have been documented in community dialogue initiatives implemented in Cox’s Bazar, where local mediation efforts contributed to improved communication between host and refugee communities.

“These are small shifts, but they are extremely important,” said Rahima Akter, a youth facilitator in Cox’s Bazar, during an in-person interview conducted in December 2025. “Unfortunately, they are difficult to capture in project reports.”

Short funding cycles further complicate the work. Many peacebuilding initiatives operate on grants lasting two or three years, while trust-building processes often require much longer. “Trust in communities takes time,” the facilitator Jaber Ali said. “Sometimes, just when relationships begin to improve, the project funding ends.”

When funding concludes, carefully cultivated networks can weaken. Trained mediators may lose the support structures that enabled them to intervene during earlier disputes, even as underlying tensions remain unresolved.

The presence of International agencies in a Rohingya Refugee Camp in Ukhia, Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Image via Wikipedia by Captain Raju. CC BY-SA 4.0.

International agencies mobilized life-saving assistance rapidly following the Rohingya crisis, delivering shelter, food, and medical services to more than 900,000 Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar.

As a result, concerns about rising living costs, pressure on local infrastructure, and competition for jobs were widely reported among host communities in the years following the refugee influx.

While international frameworks provide useful tools and guidelines, studies on adaptive peacebuilding caution that strategies successful in other contexts require careful adaptation to local realities.

Many local conflicts are deeply entangled with political party rivalries, land governance disputes, and longstanding social hierarchies. These dynamics require responses grounded in local knowledge and relationships.

Rather than withdrawal, local peacebuilders are calling for deeper collaboration, including co-designed processes involving community actors before project proposals are finalized and longer-term funding cycles that allow adaptation over time.

Reducing reporting requirements for smaller grants has also been recommended in humanitarian reform discussions to allow community organizations to focus primarily on engagement rather than administrative compliance.

Projects developed without meaningful local input risk overlooking grievances or reinforcing local inequalities, a concern highlighted in multiple studies examining participatory development practices.

By contrast, initiatives rooted in community ownership tend to prove more resilient; for example, studies on localized humanitarian action in Cox’s Bazar have demonstrated that community-led responses foster ownership and sustain communication channels even after formal project periods ended.

As Bangladesh continues to navigate economic pressures, political polarization, and the ongoing humanitarian realities surrounding the Rohingya crisis, the importance of inclusive peacebuilding becomes even more apparent.

International aid remains indispensable. Yet its effectiveness depends not only on financial resources and technical expertise, but also on humility and genuine partnership.

At the end of one community mediation meeting in Teknaf, facilitators closed the session not with a list of performance indicators, but with a series of questions: Whom should we speak with first? Which community elders might help defuse tensions? How can trust be rebuilt, step by step?

The answers to these questions rarely appear in official reports. Yet they form the quiet foundation of social cohesion. For local peacebuilders across Bangladesh, the lesson is clear: Lasting peace cannot be delivered from a distance. It must grow within communities themselves, shaped by local realities, and supported by international partners willing to listen before they act.