By members of NEAR’s four Localisation Labs in the Middle East: Syria, Yemen, Palestine and Lebanon; with support from Wejdan Jarrah, NEAR’s MENA Regional Representative

 

The NEAR Localisation Labs were envisioned as dynamic arenas for influence, designed to move beyond the traditional models of advocacy. This coaching programme emerged from a direct request by Labs to cultivate a more actualised approach—one that would empower participants  to diagnose the complex systems they inhabit, pivot through adaptive strategies, and build the relational bridges necessary for securing concrete commitments. By evolving these practices, Labs are seeking to redefine their standing on both national and global stages, transitioning from mere consultative partners to being convenors and primary influencers of their own stories.

This blog is a reflection from an advocacy coaching programme conducted with four Localisation Labs in the Middle East: Syria, Yemen, Palestine and Lebanon, when the coach wouldn’t simply hand over a checklist, but asked us to change how we think about influencing instead.

 

The Blank Template: What We Learned When the Training Refused to Be One

Before the first coaching session even started, the majority of us had already opened a document titled something like “Advocacy Strategy – Template.” We knew the drill: map the stakeholders; sharpen the key messages; set the talking points; follow the plan to the end of the year. By the end of that first session, the template was still open, and still blank – and for the first time, that did not feel like a failure.

Most of us walked in expecting another training: a presentation, a step-by-step guide, the familiar sequence of analysis, planning, implementation and reporting we had sat through, and often delivered ourselves, many times before. That is not what we got. Looking back, that is exactly why it mattered.

There was almost no lecturing. The point was never to hand us a manual of correct steps – it was to purposefully unsettle the way we see advocacy itself.

Why the straight line breaks

For most of us, advocacy training had usually followed a similar path: define the problem, build the strongest argument, plan the campaign, push it out, wait for the result. It treats advocacy as a chain of deliverables. For a long time, many of us believed that was simply how it was done.

But the crises we work inside – in Lebanon, Yemen, Palestine and Syria – do not wait politely at the end of a plan written back in January. They shift weekly. They close one door and crack open another the same afternoon. The coaching programme started from that uncomfortable truth: that real influence begins not with the strongest argument, but with how well you read the system you stand inside – its relationships, its distribution of power, and the quiet interests that protect the way things are.

So two ideas ran through every session.

♦ Adaptive leadership: the discipline of holding steady on the goal while constantly changing the route to it.

♦ And a contextual, systems-thinking view of influence: advocacy not aimed at a problem, but practised within a system you are trying to understand and gently move.

Instead of ready-made answers, we worked through real case studies from the Labs themselves – Syria, Yemen, Palestine and Lebanon.

A challenge would be placed in the middle of the room: a blocked coordination space, a donor conversation that was going nowhere, a policy opening that seemed too small to matter, or a moment when local organisations had the evidence but not yet the influence. Rather than asking, What message should we send?

We were pushed to ask different questions: »Who has the power to move this?  »Who is protecting the current arrangement?  »Where is the opening?  »What relationship needs to shift before the message can land?   That discomfort, it turned out, was the work.

No toolkit included

The choice not to hand over a toolkit was a deliberate one. The programme was built on the conviction that a checklist might solve today’s meeting, but a way of thinking would outlast it – so instead of ready-made answers, it kept returning us to the harder, slower question of the system we were trying to move. The early sessions were deliberately unsettling: we came expecting an advocacy product, and were asked instead to look at power, relationships and context.

What carried the group through that early unease was trust. Once a minimum of shared trust took hold, we began to see things the same way – to recognise how much the system matters – and that is when the programme shifted gears. What follows is what happened on the other side of that shift – in the words of the people who lived it.

In their own words

For Camilia, the coaching was reflective rather than prescriptive; and pushed her to notice the people in the room, the perspectives around a decision, and to slow down and listen before she answered.

“Advocacy is not only about having the strongest argument, but also about creating the conditions for meaningful dialogue and collective ownership of solutions. I learned that being persuasive is not always about pushing harder; sometimes it is about asking better questions and finding common ground without compromising core principles.” –Camilia Safatli

 

If Camilia loosened the grip on the argument, Jana loosened the grip on the plan itself. Her team’s instinct had always been to build the strategy, fix the messages, set the talking points, and march. The case studies from across the Labs showed her something that unsettled that instinct: the wins rarely came from a perfect plan. They came from teams that could read the variables and seize the opening in front of them.

“My biggest shift was from thinking of advocacy as a fixed plan to thinking of it as a continuous process of influence. We still need strategy, clear asks and evidence – but we also need the flexibility to adjust the message and change tactics. The best advocates are not those who always plan, but those who know how to interact with changing realities: keeping the goal, while adapting the way they reach it.” –Jana Khoury

 

Pull back from the individual and the same shift appears at the level of the institution. Mohamad spoke for both the Forum and the Lab – and for him the programme was a more organised lens for turning the priorities of local organisations into clear messages, and connecting those messages to the machinery that decides things: coordination, funding, policy. The relational insight, scaled up, becomes a strategy.

“We believe that strengthening the role of local organisations is achieved not only through more funding, but through strengthening their ability to express their priorities, take part in decision-making, and offer clear, evidence-based messages about what communities need and what local actors can provide.” –Mohamad Mansour

 

And what holds all of that together is the system itself  –  which is exactly where Aref, in Yemen, landed. He described the experience as a journey rather than a course; at first it felt ambiguous, full of questions. That ambiguity was the door. Through coaching, systems analysis and adaptive leadership, the word “advocacy” stopped meaning a set of activities and started meaning something much larger.

 

“Before this experience, I saw advocacy as limited to specific activities and methods. I realised that real influence begins with understanding the system we work in, and analysing the relationships and forces within it. Leadership is not a title; it is the ability to adapt to change and to help create solutions that make a real difference.” –Aref Ghurab

 

But none of this happens in a vacuum, and Mahmoud refused to pretend it did. From Palestine, he was candid about how unexpected the programme was. It felt richer, sharper, genuinely different from the generic, imported trainings so often delivered in the region. He was just as candid about the conditions his colleagues in Gaza were working under: internet cuts, broken transport, the daily weight of survival, which meant they could often only listen rather than fully take part. The recordings, he noted, would let them come back to the materials and reflect again, later, when there was room to breathe.

“This was completely different from the standard trainings we take or deliver  –  the kind that are generic and cut out of their own context. Because this one touches our reality, we absorb it and understand it more deeply, and its impact reaches further than ordinary training. When it is tied clearly to local networks, member organisations and partners can actually apply it.” –Mahmoud Hamada

 

And then there was the person who came in most certain it would be like all the others. Abdullah braced for the familiar boredom of slide-driven workshops. Instead, in his own words, it was a shock. A shock  that rearranged how he thinks about advocacy and influence, and turned his confusion into the strongest motivation he had to dig deeper. He left holding a set of lessons that read less like training notes and more like a creed:

• Planning and running advocacy campaigns is only one partial step in the wider work of change and influence.
• Advocacy is a long journey: defining goals, understanding the system, the distribution of power, the effectiveness of actors –  then intervening, patiently, to adjust it.
• Above all else, timing is the single biggest factor in whether advocacy succeeds or fails.
• Creating new systems is far easier than reforming existing ones, which are guarded by rings of entrenched interest.
• None of it can be done well except through an adaptive leadership

“Teaching by rote was almost absent. Everything rested on changing the way of thinking  –  first preparing the mind, then offering new knowledge backed by real examples that we discussed among ourselves. Achieving even one step of progress on this hard journey is success in itself.” –Abdullah loulou

 

What the blank template was for

Read together, these voices from across the Localisation Labs in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Palestine, and grounded in case studies, tell one story from six angles. Advocacy is not a straight line from problem to result. Advocacy is a relational, strategic practice that lives inside a system: it asks us to listen before we argue, to understand interests before we advance a position, to build trust as much as we present evidence, and to remember that lasting change is almost always collective, never solo.

That is what coaching makes possible and training rarely can: to coach and accompany rather than to instruct, and to trust that the people closest to a crisis already carry the insight, and that the real work is making room for it to surface and having the patience to let the discomfort do its work. To think in systems – rather than in straight lines – is to stop pretending complexity away and start working with it. The blank template, it turns out, was never a gap to be filled. It was the starting point to real change.