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The reception of Syrian refugees has dominated negotiations between neighbouring host states, such as Jordan and Turkey, and donors in the Global North. Despite the growing literature on external funding, how international stakeholders navigate the domestic context is understudied. This article employs the lens of depoliticisation and analyses tools employed by international stakeholders manoeuvring domestic contexts in centralised states. We argue that international stakeholders adopt a depoliticised approach that portrays them and the actors they work with as service providers while working with national governments that engage in rent-seeking. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with donors and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) as international stakeholders in Jordan and Turkey, the contribution of the article is two-fold. First, although the 'local' is ever present in policy and research discussions, research and policy often conflate regional organisations, national governments and municipalities. We therefore further disentangle the power relations between the various actors categorised as 'local'. Second, we offer a conceptual understanding of how international stakeholders navigate the dynamics of local power relations and the domestic politics in centralised states with rent-seeking behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]