The Expansion of Community Refugee Sponsorship: Principles for Sustainability and Australia’s Community Support Program in Review

Abstract The question of what constitutes a “sustainable” community refugee sponsorship programme invites timely reflection on the diverse and often competing claims made about the social benefit/s and purpose of refugee sponsorship initiatives. For the fast-increasing number of states developing new programmes for community refugee sponsorship, sustainability is often framed as a question of a sponsorship programme’s uptake and fundamental viability. For new sponsorship programmes in particular, less attention has been paid to the content of sustainability beyond programme and sponsor uptake. By considering conceptual framings of sustainability, this article engages with sustainability as an inherently normative idea and examines the question of sustainability within refugee community sponsorship programmes through a focus on Australia’s Community Support Program (CSP). In so doing, it presents three key principles that shape the sustainability of new sponsorship programmes. The article’s analysis is based on an original, qualitative dataset of interviews with 41 participants from refugee advocacy and resettlement organisations, refugee and diaspora groups, policy-makers, and experts involved in the CSP. While the article focuses on the Australian CSP, it addresses high-level principles of sustainability, which may be considered, applied, and in some instances productively distinguished from comparable refugee sponsorship programmes.