The Myth of Self-Reliance. Naohiko Omata
desire to be locally integrated in Ghana. Despite the renowned reputation of the camp, why did hundreds of refugees protest so adamantly against UNHCR’s local integration plan? Didn’t these refugees enjoy decent living conditions? On the surface, there was indeed a wide range of economic activities visible in the camp. But did a variety of economic activities mean a correspondingly high level of economic well-being? Behind the façade of a vibrant economy, how were refugees living in this ‘successful’ refugee camp?
Several scholars have published insightful studies exploring different economic aspects of Liberian refugees in Buduburam camp (e.g. Dick 2002a, 2002b; Dzeamesi 2008; Hardgrove 2009; Porter et al. 2008). To date, however, the existing work has not presented convincing or sufficient data on the nature of refugee livelihoods and their socio-economic conditions. Therefore, the central aim of this book is to put the putative economic success of Buduburam camp under intensive scrutiny and to reveal the diversified realities of the refugees’ livelihood strategies and living conditions.
While this study probes into refugees’ economic lives inside the camp, it also demonstrates how different groups of refugees navigated various difficulties during their prolonged exile, as well as in the aftermath of repatriation and following invocation of the Cessation Clause of refugee status. This book is based upon a decade work with Liberian refugees. My first visit to Buduburam camp dates back to 2005. I worked as a livelihood advisor for an NGO operating inside the camp until the end of 2007. In 2008 and 2009, I returned to Buduburam as a researcher and conducted research in Ghana and Liberia for thirteen months. At that point, the Buduburam refugee population was already entering the final phase of formal refugee life due to the intense pressure surrounding plans to repatriate the camp’s inhabitants to Liberia. In 2012, UNHCR invoked the cessation of refugee status of Liberian refugees. Between 2012 and 2013, I conducted a follow-up study with my refugee interviewees in the face of the ending of their ‘official’ refugee life. By following the same refugee households over several years, this book sheds light on refugees’ voices and lived experiences in protracted forced displacement, which rarely reach the main policy arenas of the international community.
Growing Interest in Refugees’ Livelihoods and Self-Reliance
The issue of refugees’ economic autonomy in Buduburam is of wider significance for the global refugee regime. Interest in promoting the livelihoods of refugees and their ‘self-reliance’ began to emerge as a pressing agenda in forced-migration policy and the academic arena around the beginning of this century (see Crisp 2003a; Milner 2014). This emergence is largely due to the failure of UNHCR to provide effective solutions for the numerous protracted refugee situations in which refugees have been in exile for at least five years.
One of the essential mandates of UNHCR is to find durable solutions for refugees, usually glossed as voluntary repatriation, local integration or third-country resettlement. Despite some large-scale repatriation programmes in the 1990s, significant numbers of refugees throughout the world did not return home because of continuing insecurity and instability in their country of origin (Crisp 2006: 11–12). Their integration in a host country did not take place either. The majority of refugees have not been granted permanent residential status in their first asylum country as their host state perceives refugees as a burden on the country (USCRI 2004: 44).
Meanwhile, the chance of being resettled in a third country in the developed world has remained extremely limited for the world’s refugee population. Especially after the terrorist attack in New York on 11 September 2001, the pressure on asylum in the industrialized North has been reinforced and has further slimmed down resettlement opportunities for refugees (Koser 2007: 235; Van Hear 2011: 8). At the end of 2015, at least half of the world’s refugee population was estimated to be in protracted exile, with the average length of time spent in exile estimated to be approximately twenty-six years (UNHCR 2016).
What is worse, as refugee situations become protracted, levels of international relief are normally reduced or entirely cut off (Jacobsen 2005: 2) because UNHCR and donor communities tend to focus on high-profile refugee crises in which people are either fleeing or repatriating in large numbers (Crisp 2003b: 9). As a result, assistance programmes for long-term refugee situations are frequently deprived of adequate funding. With the declining financial commitment of international donors, UNHCR is increasingly unable to provide essential needs for prolonged refugee populations (Jamal 2000: 3). In the face of mounting budgetary shortfalls, UNHCR has been required to find a remedy for these trapped exiles in long-term ‘care-and-maintenance’ circumstances (Crisp 2003a).
Due to these systemic pressures, there has been growing interest within the international refugee regime in promoting the development of livelihoods for long-term refugees so as to encourage economic ‘self-reliance’.4 UNHCR broadly defines self-reliance as ‘the social and economic ability of an individual, a household or a community to meet essential needs in a sustainable manner’ (UNHCR 2005a). Its guiding philosophy can be summarized as: refugees have the skills, capacity and agency to stand on their own and be able to sustain themselves without depending on external humanitarian aid (Jacobsen 2005). This concept has become an increasingly visible part of UNHCR’s approach and rhetoric towards refugee assistance and protection (Crisp 2004). For example, UNHCR’s ‘Handbook for Self-Reliance’ states that self-reliance is ‘an integral and underpinning part of any durable solutions’ (UNHCR 2005a), which should be promoted in all phases of refugee assistance.
However, the promotion of refugees’ self-reliance is fraught with some fundamental problems. As non-citizens of the host country, refugees in developing regions are confronted by a number of survival challenges in often inhospitable environments. According to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, refugees must be accorded the same status as nationals with regard to the right to engage in wage-earning employment. Typically, however, refugees’ right to work is significantly constrained by various bureaucratic or regulatory impediments imposed on refugees by the host government, including lack of access to work permits and restrictions on the freedom of movement (see Horst 2006a; Jacobsen 2014; Kaiser 2007; Kibreab 2003; Werker 2007). In addition to formal regulations, ample evidence indicates that refugees’ access to economic resources such as land, rivers, lakes, and forests is constrained through informal regulation by local host populations (Bakewell 2014; Bascom 1993; Rogge and Akol 1989).
Furthermore, the majority of protracted refugee situations in the world are located in countries with impoverished populations, where even local host communities themselves are often unable to satisfy their fundamental needs (Meyer 2006: 11). Existing studies pose a fundamental question concerning whether it is feasible to expect refugees to be able to economically sustain themselves within exceptionally constrained environments.
Despite these fundamental challenges for refugees, UNHCR and its partner agencies have traditionally approached the issue of livelihoods and self-reliance from a technical perspective, primarily focusing on the provision of income-generating projects, micro-finance programmes and vocational training (Crisp 2003a).5 While this technical perspective is important, provision of such support makes sense only when refugees are given an enabling environment to pursue economic autonomy in a host state.
More problematically, there are to date no systematic and rigorous criteria for measuring refugees’ self-reliance in the international refugee regime. UNHCR often perceives refugees as ‘self-reliant’ when they are managing their lives without external assistance. But what requires careful scrutiny is whether refugees living without aid are necessarily ‘meeting their basic needs in a sustainable manner and with dignity’, as defined by UNHCR (UNHCR 2005a). Additionally, the absence of assessment criteria means that there is a risk that the promotion of self-reliance could be abused to justify a reduction in external support for refugees. Among refugee-policy makers, the notion of self-reliance is very often positioned in polar opposition to ‘dependency’ – a state in which people rely heavily on and expect continued assistance, consequently undermining people’s own initiatives (Harvey and Lind 2005). If dependency is induced by continuous provision of aid, the promotion of self-reliance is assumed to be automatically achieved by decreasing