Reconstruction Priorities in Post-War Lebanon and the Imperative for Accountable, Equitable Recovery — a Primer by Arab Watch Coalition
In the wake of the 2024–2025 Israeli assault on Lebanon, the question of reconstruction has re-emerged as an urgent national priority. Yet this is not reconstruction as the country has previously known it. Unlike earlier moments of crisis—such as the aftermath of the 2006 war or the 2020 Beirut Port explosion—the present moment is characterized by a profound convergence of military destruction, financial collapse, institutional paralysis, and geopolitical volatility. For Lebanon, rebuilding is not only about replacing lost infrastructure; it is about navigating the structural impossibility of recovery with little state legitimacy, inclusive governance, or fiscal capacity.
As the Arab Watch Coalition (AWC), a regional network committed to monitoring international financial institutions (IFIs) and advancing justice-oriented fiscal policy in the Arab region, we assert that reconstruction must be understood not simply as an act of rebuilding, but as a test of political will, public accountability, and economic fairness. As such, AWC has engaged consistently with IFI staff and stakeholders (such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) on Lebanon’s reform trajectory.
Our recent discussions underscored how deeply constrained Lebanon’s fiscal outlook remains. Despite inflation dropping to single digits, the cost of living continues to rise, and the 2025 budget—though expanded to $5 billion—offers little flexibility. The country remains locked out of concessional lending mechanisms. Lebanon’s central bank (Banque du Liban) continues to show deep negative equity, and its reform of banking secrecy laws has made only marginal progress since 2022.
The war has significantly expanded Lebanon’s external financing needs. The IMF maintains that reconstruction should be funded externally and decoupled from broader reform conditionality. There is an urgent need for immediate, unconditional support for recovery, coupled with long-term, inclusive planning and participation.
AWC’s role is therefore twofold: to ensure transparency and equity in how reconstruction is financed and governed, and to advocate for a socially just framework that resists austerity, privatization, and elite capture. This article reflects our commitment to shaping that conversation through critical analysis of the legal, institutional, and economic choices that lie ahead.
I. Rebuilding Lebanon After the War: Why the Stakes Are Higher Than Ever
The 2024–2025 Israeli assault on Lebanon inflicted catastrophic destruction across the country’s southern towns, Beqaa villages, and peripheral neighborhoods in Greater Beirut, with continuous ceasefire violations taking place to date.
Yet Lebanon’s current reality—defined by political collapse, fiscal failure, crumbling infrastructure, and institutional decay—makes this post-war moment dramatically different from prior experiences. The physical damage is immense, with early World Bank estimates placing losses at $8.5 billion, and others projecting over three times that figure. But beyond the rubble lies a far more complex crisis: one of social fragmentation, eroded public trust, and contested visions for the state’s role in economic and spatial life.
The challenge of reconstruction is thus not only about technical delivery or engineering capacity—it is about how the state imagines its obligations to its people. The Arab Watch Coalition underscores that without structural shifts in governance, participation, and financing, the process risks reproducing old injustices: privatization of public space, displacement of the poor, exclusion of marginalized groups, environmental degradation, and heightened risks of corruption and mismanagement of public funds. What is needed is a reconstruction vision that centers equity, dignity, and the right to remain. In this context, the stakes are existential: either Lebanon rebuilds its commons—or it rebuilds the architecture of collapse.
II. Beyond Physical Structures: The Limitations of the Current Reconstruction Law
The reconstruction law passed in December 2024 presents itself as an expedient response to the war’s destruction. Yet, as documented by The Legal Agenda and other experts, it is modeled almost identically on Law 263 (2014), which governed post-2006 rebuilding. This legal recycling reveals a broader failure to engage with the depth and complexity of the present crisis. The law focuses narrowly on buildings, allowing property owners to rebuild according to exceptional provisions, but it excludes dwellers in informal settlements, renters, and those living on public or collective land—populations that were among the hardest hit.
Moreover, the law fails to address the broader spatial, social, and infrastructural needs of reconstruction. It offers no vision for reorganizing public infrastructure, no guarantees for affordable housing, and no safeguards against real estate speculation. Past experiences have shown that similar legal frameworks have entrenched elite interests, legalized informal power, and deepened urban and rural inequality.
For the Arab Watch Coalition, the concern is not only with the national law itself, but with the risk that international financial institutions (IFIs) will endorse, finance, and legitimize reconstruction efforts grounded in this exclusionary framework. Our advocacy is directed at the IFIs to urge them not to accept or build upon a legal and governance model that reproduces injustice. Instead, IFIs must condition their engagement and financing on the development of inclusive, equitable, and participatory reconstruction frameworks—ones that repair, rather than reinforce, the foundations of collapse.
III. Institutional Accountability and the Role of Financial Institutions in Reconstruction
As international donors and financial institutions prepare to mobilize funding for Lebanon’s recovery, it is critical to situate their role within the broader historical failures of post-war financing in the country. IFI-led reconstruction has often prioritized speed over justice, fiscal discipline over inclusion, and capital recovery over public welfare. AWC’s engagement with the IMF and other actors underscores a key risk: that external financing—especially in a politically paralyzed state—could bypass democratic process and further empower entrenched elites.
We must resist the pattern of relying on non-state actors, party-affiliated NGOs, and informal networks to deliver services and compensation. Instead, IFIs must be pressed to invest in public institutions through mechanisms of conditional transparency and participatory oversight. As AWC continues to emphasize, it is not enough to decouple reconstruction from reform: reconstruction must itself be a platform for rethinking reform, anchored in equity and state accountability. All financing must be bound to commitments that ensure fiscal justice, not austerity; institutional development, not technocratic outsourcing.
IV. Addressing the Diversity of Affected Areas and the Need for Diversified Recovery
Lebanon’s war-affected regions encompass a spectrum of urban and rural geographies with vastly different social, legal, and infrastructural characteristics. Treating all zones through a single lens—especially one that favors property owners and formal settlements—risks reinforcing existing marginalities. Towns like Baalbek in Eastern Lebanon and Nabatieh in South Lebanon include heritage zones and traditional housing clusters poorly served by current zoning laws. Informal settlements in Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut include a mix of public and private land claims and host thousands of displaced people and low-income residents.
AWC urges that recovery frameworks must adopt a differentiated approach, grounded in community consultation and local planning. This also requires deconstructing the urban-rural binary in policy frameworks and recognizing the complex interdependence between Lebanon’s peripheries and its urban centers.
V. Reconstruction as a Socioeconomic and Ecological Process
The war did not only destroy buildings; it further decimated economic life, poisoned ecosystems, and disrupted vital supply chains. Entire agricultural areas in the South and Beqaa were contaminated with white phosphorus, destroying livelihoods for years to come. Markets, clinics, and communal infrastructure were flattened. Public life—already battered by debt and austerity—now faces further erosion.
AWC argues that reconstruction must extend far beyond concrete structure. It must be a comprehensive strategy for economic revitalization and ecological rehabilitation, including support for local cooperatives, reforestation, decontamination, and the repair of public services. Donor frameworks must not isolate physical repair from social repair. If IFIs and state actors fail to engage with these interconnected realities, reconstruction will serve as little more than a cosmetic patch to a deep social problem.
VI. Ensuring the Right to Return and the Right to Remain
One of the gravest risks in the aftermath of war is that displacement becomes permanent. Already, thousands remain unable to return to their homes due to housing destruction, rent inflation, or lack of legal clarity. The current legal framework grants power solely to property owners, sidelining tenants and non-formal residents. As with Beirut post-2020, and Nahr al-Bared after 2007, this opens the door to de facto cleansing under the guise of redevelopment.
AWC demands that reconstruction include guarantees for dignified, affordable, and non-discriminatory return, alongside mechanisms for rent control, housing subsidies, and protections for vulnerable groups. The right to the city must be restored as a collective, not exclusive, right. Otherwise, Lebanon risks replacing bombs with bulldozers in the ongoing displacement of its poor.
VII. Rethinking Governance: Participatory and Decentralized Reconstruction
Lebanon’s municipalities and local authorities have long been sidelined in planning and governance.
The centralization of power—and its subsequent co-optation by sectarian interests—has eroded democratic accountability and disabled local innovation.Reconstruction offers a moment to reverse this trajectory.
AWC calls for a decentralized and participatory governance model for reconstruction, where municipalities, municipal unions, civil society, and residents co-design the recovery process. IFI-financed projects must be conditioned on local consultation, oversight councils, and rights-based assessments. Reconstruction is not only a technical process; it is an opportunity to renew the social contract and democratic imagination.
Conclusion: Reconstruction as a National and Political Project
Lebanon’s 2024–2025 war is not only a humanitarian tragedy—it also mirrored failures of governance, economics, and geopolitics. Reconstruction must therefore go beyond repair. It must offer restitution and justice for the people of Lebanon. As the Arab Watch Coalition, we call for a reconstruction process that does not merely rebuild what was—but builds toward what could be: a more just, equitable, and sovereign Lebanon.
International financial institutions and donors have a responsibility to resist past patterns of technocracy and exclusion. They must support frameworks that center participation, sustainability, and rights. And they must engage with civil society not as implementers, but as co-authors of policy and stewards of accountability.
Lebanon stands at a crossroad. The road it takes will be shaped not only by what is funded—but by who is heard, who decides, and who is restored.
By Hussein Cheaito