Humanitarian spill-over: the expansion of hybrid humanitarian governance from camps to refugee hosting societies in East Africa

ABSTRACT

The impact and effects of protracted refugee camps on their host environments in East Africa has been the subject of much academic attention since the late 1990s. Such camps are often viewed as exclusionary spaces that isolate refugees from their host societies. Recent analyses, however, posit such camps as hybrid spaces, with fluid boundaries, that provide socio-economic opportunities and are potential drivers of development. Less thinking has gone into how forms of (humanitarian) governance emanate from such camps and impact their host environments. This paper is based on ethnographic research in and around refugee camps in Kenya and Tanzania. Grounded in a spatial analysis of camp development processes, this paper explores the notion of ‘humanitarian spill-over’. It argues that camps’ specific governmental processes and bureaucratic power come to co-govern and co-shape socio-spatial relations beyond the boundaries of the camp and the initial targets of humanitarian concern. By analysing the socio-spatial effects of long-term humanitarian governance, this paper contributes to, debates about camps as hybrid spaces and locates experiments with developmental approaches to camp environments in East Africa in a history of a more organic process of spill-over. We show how the spill-over is increasingly posited as intention rather than effect.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee camps
• Tanzania
• Kenya
• humanitarianism
• hybrid settlements
• host communities

The impacts that long-term refugee camps have on their surrounding areas and the ways they become embedded in their host environments has become the subject of increased attention in recent years.¹ Refugee camps have long time been perceived and treated as temporary humanitarian necessities and ‘isolating spaces’ for the purpose of managing human displacement.² Although recent studies seek to nuance the hard boundaries between camps and their host environments,³ the approach within refugee and humanitarian studies is mostly focused on social, legal or practical aspects of ‘managing refugees’.⁴ Such an approach tends to neglect the ways in which the presence of such camps, and their interactions with their host environments, alters and reshapes broader aspects of everyday life around these sites. Yet it is evident that these camps often become quasi-permanent fixtures that reshape local spaces of social, political, and economic interaction.

This paper aims to further develop this theme. It explores the ways and effects of socio-spatial ordering in camp hosting environments, and argues that, through the blurring of social, cultural, political and economic life of camp and non-camp populations, forms of humanitarian governance emanate from camps and spill-over into wider refugee hosting environments. We refer to this phenomenon as ‘humanitarian spill-over’, which can be defined as the process in which camp governance and humanitarian presence comes to have an expanding economic, social, cultural and political influence over the wider regions in which camps are located, producing forms of hybrid humanitarian governance beyond the camp. With this, we argue the need for a more spatial approach to aid and camp development in order to understand how humanitarian governance transforms broader refugee hosting environments.

Based on a spatial analysis of refugee camp development, we show how, over time, non-refugee populations become exposed to forms of humanitarian governance, either by programme or as an ‘auxiliary effect’⁵ of long-term humanitarian presence. Humanitarian governance in this perspective implies a global governance of people and space with the underlying rationale of saving the lives, reducing the suffering, and enhancing the welfare of the world’s most vulnerable and neglected populations.⁶ With this focus on the spill-over of humanitarian governance, we aim to move beyond merely examining the socio-economic effects of refugee hosting on host environments, as explored in various studies on impacts of camps on host environments.⁷ Instead, we argue that forms of humanitarian steering emerge from camp spaces and influence the governing of, or even come to co-govern, wider refugee hosting environments.

By focusing on the ways in which power processes expand beyond the camp to include non-refugee populations and environments, we seek to engage with debates about the blurring of boundaries between camps and their surroundings as ‘ambiguous zones of indistinction’.⁸ The interplay of humanitarian, governmental and refugee initiated organizations, institutions and practices emerge over time, and constitute a hybrid humanitarian governance which transcends beyond the camp and co-shapes – and is co-shaped by – the everyday lives of host communities in the region beyond. Our core contribution is to highlight how the spill-over of humanitarian governance brings the particularities of power arrangements and contestations from within camps into the non-camp setting. This leads us to question how, and to what extent, the rationalities, subjectivities and practices of the camp come to apply in the broader setting, and the ways in which this is being picked up in contemporary ideas about the future of refugee hosting. Novel approaches for integrating refugee camps into their hosting environments, such as durable approaches to refugee camps and the idea of hybrid or open settlements, are examples of where this analysis may prove useful. We consider that these approaches are extensions of existing situations, and represent a way of formally labelling developments in camp hosting regions that have been in the making much longer and on a more spontaneous basis. In other words, the spill-over becomes institutionalized.

Based on ethnographic studies in and around Nyarugusu and Kakuma refugee camp in Tanzania and Kenya respectively this paper analyses the interactions and relations between camp actors, local populations and authorities, that produce, are influenced by, and respond to, the process of humanitarian spill-over. We first discuss the idea of humanitarian spill-over from a theoretical perspective and present a short methodological note. We then present two case studies of Nyarugusu and Kakuma. We conclude with a reflection on how these protracted cases relate to contemporary debates on long-term refugee hosting and its impacts on refugee hosting societies.

Boundaries and humanitarian spill-over

Interest in spatial analyses of humanitarianism has been on the increase in recent years.⁹ It is recognized that the materiality of refugee camps has wider effects than the direct aims of projects of aid interventions, and create forms of humanitarian governance that exert considerable influence over space and territory.¹⁰ As a result, a blurring of boundaries between camps and their host environments leads to the very presence of camps influencing wider contexts in other ways than disturbance, compensation, or practical assistance. The blurring indicates that where camps end, and transgress into non-camp, spaces of indistinction emerge in which populations, socio-economic processes and forms of governance, thought to be separated by the camp’s boundaries, become intertwined.¹¹

This blurring of boundaries is arguably related to the duration of a camp’s existence. These processes increase in protracted or chronic aid interventions in which aid, as a temporary relief measure, evolves into more structural forms of public service delivery and the infrastructural and socio-economic organization of the surrounding region. This is partly due to the emergence and development of camp economies that are strongly related to, and impact on, their host environments.¹² This in turn raises questions about governance, belonging, authority, and power.

Refugee camps have been associated, discussed, and criticized, as states of exception.¹³ These analyses have invariably focused on the power to exclude and confine people as refugees, through legal suspension of the law, and henceforth, an almost permanent marginalization that is not only legitimized or condoned by war, but also by humanitarianism.¹⁴ This rather legalistic and static image of refugee camps as enclosures has been criticized for obscuring the political lives and agency of refugees within these camp settings. Instead, the strict boundaries of exclusion become eroded with the passing of time and as camps become protracted.¹⁵

Yet notions about how the state of exception applies beyond camps, especially as they blur with their local environment, have been less considered. Martin criticizes this Agambian perspective, examining the blurring of the boundaries between Lebanese camps and their surrounding urban environments. She talks of a ‘campscape’ arguing that the ways that people relate to, and are affected by, the categories produced as part of the camp rationale, are actually much more fluid than the legalistic view suggests.¹⁶ In a similar vein, Meiches reflects on the ‘elasticity of the modern camp’, stressing how its boundaries fluctuate and the regulatory effects of the camp and its contestations, may expand, detract or indeed come to apply to a more diverse human population, including non-refugees.¹⁷ As a result, images of camp-dwellers as mere non-political bare life,¹⁸ and of camps as bounded spaces, both become problematic.

Inspired by these notions on blurring camp boundaries we argue that over time, a humanitarian governance emerges, expanding from the camp and spilling over into the wider region. Rather than governing in a top-down fashion, this influence is negotiated, contested, resisted, and accepted by the meeting of humanitarian actors, authorities, refugees, and host communities. This spill-over takes various shapes in which the effects (direct and indirect), intention (intentional and unintentional) and duration (short-term and long-term) may differ, but lead to the further blurring of boundaries and the negotiated care and control of the territories and lives of people beyond strict or initial humanitarian concern.

This notion of the spill-over becomes increasingly relevant as the number of protracted crises and conflicts increases or becomes indefinite. This is sparking debates among academics, practitioners and governments about the alternatives to hosting refugees in spaces of containment, or the camp-model, towards more durable approaches to refugee hosting such as hybrid settlements or out-of-camp approaches with a focus on self-reliance.

Methodology

Our analysis is based on the comparison of two protracted refugee camp environments in Tanzania and Kenya. The case of Nyarugusu in Tanzania is based on fieldwork from [Milou de Bruijne] in 2016–2017, and illustrates how humanitarian programming within, and mitigation outside, the camp, came to influence everyday lives of the non-camp population, producing hybrid humanitarian governance beyond the camp. This ethnographic study was largely done outside the refugee camp and involved exploring its direct vicinity, interviewing inhabitants from the region (including refugees) and political, governmental and humanitarian actors. Coupled with a literature review of previous studies in the region, this allowed for an exploration of the historical evolution of the spill-over. This generated insights into how the effects of the camp and its humanitarian entourage were understood, adapted to, resisted and negotiated outside of its formal boundaries; i.e. how the humanitarian spill-over became institutionalized over time.

The case of Kakuma in Kenya is based on fieldwork by [Bram J. Jansen] and was carried out between 2004 and 2012, with additional follow ups from a distance. It explores how camp mitigation-effects and socio-economic processes between camp and non-camp dwellers, shaped a hybrid humanitarian governance that came to engage with a much wider spatial and ecological ordering. Based on a camp-ethnography, the study included a focus on the effects of the camp on its wider environment, and was followed up with literature study and participation in humanitarian debates on innovation and new approaches to developing and managing long-term refugee camps.

Inspired by Lefebvre’s notions and interplay of conceived, perceived and lived space¹⁹ and its adaptation to humanitarian contexts by Smirl,²⁰ both cases engage with the spatiality of humanitarianism, in the sense that they seek to understand how programmes, policies and design, and the everyday practices of aid implementation and governmental control, materialize on the ground and come to affect how space is maintained, interpreted and negotiated.

The case of Nyarugusu: negotiating humanitarian potential beyond the camp

Kigoma region has for long been home to migrating populations, tied through age-old bonds and shared ethnic and linguistic traits, and served as a safe haven for refugees after Tanzania’s independence.²¹ Between 1993 and 2000 the region saw a rapid influx of refugees, with over 1.5 million refugees residing in more than 11 camps in Kigoma and neighbouring Kagera region.²² During this time – in 1996 – Nyarugusu camp in the Kasulu district of Kigoma region was established.

While Tanzania has long been praised for its open refugee policy, its stance to refugee hosting has gradually changed. Formalized in the 1998 Refugee Act, the Tanzanian government introduced a strict encampment policy and enforced the repatriation of Rwandese and Burundian refugees following tenuous peace in their countries.²³ As a consequence, Nyarugusu became the sole remaining refugee camp (while Mtabila was transformed into a military camp in 2012), hosting over 60,000 Congolese refugees. Following renewed political turmoil in Burundi in 2015, the camp doubled in size to include an additional 65,000 Burundian refugees.²⁴

The dynamics and effects of the massive refugee influxes in north-western Tanzania have been well studied.²⁵ This body of research provides significant insights into the social, economic, cultural and political dynamics in and around refugee camps, which already points to the blurring of camp boundaries. However, apart from this attention to the ‘effects’ of refugee hosting and Landau’s findings on early socio-political transformations in Kasulu district,²⁶ the ways in which hybrid humanitarian governance processes over time spill-over from the camp has remained unexplored.

The case of Nyarugusu illustrates how humanitarian presence and camp development shaped a regime of expectations and practices among humanitarian and government actors, host and refugee populations, giving rise to hybrid humanitarian governance. The Nyarugusu case shows this spill-over was produced through programmatic, auxiliary and negotiated spaces of aid.

Humanitarian programmes and socio-spatial ordering beyond the camp

Humanitarian actors exercise a form of control over territory by informing physical camp development. Over the years, there has been increasing interest in the caring and the controlling practices of humanitarianism²⁷ and the increased recognition of refugees as active agents in what Feldman sees as ‘refusals within humanitarianism’²⁸ and Agier denotes as ‘forms of resistance’²⁹: refugees who strategically negotiate humanitarian aid, rather than accepting top-down measures. However, little attention has been paid to the ways in which humanitarian design, and the ways in which aid is provided – based on humanitarian standards, host countries’ regulations and funding flows – shape and govern the non-camp human and physical environments.

The sudden influx of Burundian refugees in 2015 created a need to expand Nyarugusu’s ‘holding capacity’.³⁰ This involved the appropriation of farming land used by Tanzanian communities, who resisted and were eventually driven from the fields by military force.³¹ As a result of the expansion, the road initially passing the camp and linking remote border villages such as Nyarugusu village to villages alongside the main Kigoma-Kasulu-Kibondo road was incorporated into the camp, with police exercising ‘border’ and bureaucratic controls (e.g. asking for permits) at both formal camp entrances.

Clearly, joint decisions by the government and humanitarian actors about the design of the camp, did not merely enforce administrative and territorial control on the movements of refugees. Rather, the expansion of the camp affected the lives of populations outside the camp through the loss of livelihood opportunities, and implied control on everyday movements and socio-economic life.

There were other ways in which humanitarian programming shaped the lives of non-camp populations. For example, when new refugee shelters were located close to the river and surface water was drained to provide water for the camp, the host communities downstream complained about having inadequate and polluted water. Moreover, while refugees were given dry food rations and cooking materials, fuel for cooking was not part of the package. And since it was officially prohibited to cut trees, both inside and outside the camp, refugees were obliged to travel long distances to find firewood which increased competition for, and contributed to the depletion of natural resources in the area.³² This highlighted something else. The impact of camp development and humanitarian involvement in one of the poorest and most marginalized regions of Tanzania³³ provoked humanitarian needs-assessments and comparisons between refugee and host communities, which in some cases highlighted that refugees were ‘better off’.³⁴ As such and by matter of compensation and mitigation, humanitarian organizations drilled boreholes and set up water schemes, established schools and health posts, provided tree-seedlings and built the capacities of Village Environment Committees (VECs) in the camp’s neighbouring communities to encourage environmental protection.³⁵

The negative effects of camp development and the fear for shrinking asylum space provoked additional mitigation measures by humanitarian actors. This instigated an ongoing game in which (local) government authorities and host communities would grant humanitarian access and room for manoeuvre in exchange for compensation by the humanitarian apparatus.³⁶

Humanitarian engagement with the host communities was thus not just the result of need-based support, but also part of a negotiation strategy to ease and facilitate good relations to ensure the future of refugee and humanitarian presence in the area. The availability of free healthcare to host communities in the camp hospital was one such strategy that was practiced since the early days of the camp. Other examples included the facilitation of (environmental) conflict resolution meetings between refugees and host communities – so-called ‘good neighbourhood meetings’ – and the provision of fuel and cars to the police to ensure security and assist the VECs with patrolling.

Clearly, the region was no tabula rasa and host communities were exposed to what Turner describes as ‘state-of-the art humanitarian interventions’.³⁷ The spatial effects and expansion of the humanitarian mandate beyond the camp (by mitigation, compensation, needs assessment and negotiation), highlight how humanitarian actors through their programmes come to co-shape socio-spatial relations, exercising a form of technocratic humanitarian governance over non-camp populations.

Auxiliary spill-overs – humanitarian presence and opportunities

Over time, the socio-spatial effects characterized as humanitarian spill-over, influenced ideas and perpetuated expectations about humanitarian inclusion and potential beyond the camp, giving rise to a sense of entitlement to humanitarian services among host communities. The spill-over further materialized in the region through what Smirl refers to as the ‘auxiliary spaces of aid’: the material facilitation of aid – compounds, hotels and land cruisers.³⁸ According to Smirl, practices surrounding humanitarian spaces shape the perceptions and behaviour of aid recipients and providers. The Nyarugusu case highlights how dynamics around auxiliary spaces of aid come to apply in the setting beyond the camp and how hybrid humanitarian governance spills over into the lives of host populations.

In Kasulu district, these auxiliary spaces of aid materialized as spaces of expectations and opportunities. For instance, humanitarian compounds and guesthouse hosting aid workers were seen as providing access to power, knowledge, employment, assistance, and contacts and thus serving as gateways to development and resources. Organizations and individual aid workers spoken with explained how they received requests to financially or technically support local development initiatives which they sometimes supported.³⁹ Further, residents of the communities hosting humanitarian compounds mentioned that the presence of humanitarian actors influenced them to change certain practices (hygiene/business), whereas residents of an ‘excluded’ Nyarugusu village expressed their wish to host compounds in order to gain economic and social development from the presence of aid workers:

We don’t experience much of the agencies as they have their compounds in Makere and not in Nyarugusu. We would very much like the agencies to bring their compounds to Nyarugusu, as it would bring a nice outlook to the village, just as you see now in Makere. It would bring infrastructure, employment and even electricity as the agencies would like to have electricity. Now the only thing we see of them is the dust of their cars passing by.⁴⁰

In a similar fashion, a local political leader and WFP staff explained that when conversations were held about the potential (re-) opening of a new camp site to host the increasing number of refugees, this had spurred competition among local leaders in the whole region to host the new site, aiming to benefit from the socio-economic potential of the refugee camp and its humanitarian entourage.⁴¹

Clearly, seemingly apolitical, operational choices by humanitarian organizations of where to settle, in fact embodied a power to provide opportunities to some, while excluding others. It shows how dynamics around auxiliary spaces of aid spill-over and come to co-govern lives of host populations.

Negotiating the humanitarian spill-over

The long-term presence of the camp, and expanded mandates, created a sense of entitlement and a desire to aid and services among the local population, whereas its absence, and the enforcement and effects of the territorial and administrative categorization of ‘camp beneficiaries’ and ‘non-camp locals’, was perceived as an abandonment. There was an accompanying rationale that as the government already lacked capacity to take care of refugees, it could neither compensate for the effects of their presence on adjacent communities, nor provide general services to its citizens. Host community members and local government officials used this argument and compared the situation within and outside the camp to argue for the disbursement of humanitarian aid beyond the camp’s boundaries. Consequently and over time, host communities and government aimed to shape the spill-over to match their interests, for instance by arguing for aid and by tapping into the benefits of humanitarian presence.

The desire of geographically excluded populations to host aid actors and to facilitate and accommodate humanitarian presence led to the development of friendly relations with aid workers, with some constructing and operating guesthouses to tap into the opportunities that these long-term guests brought. In a similar vein, an elder explained how, during the first influxes in the 1990s, local people strategically positioned themselves for humanitarian employment by taking typing courses after this was listed as one of the UN’s job requirements.⁴²

Alongside these forms of accommodation, host populations also resisted the ‘status quo’ by demanding clean water,⁴³ by dropping off proposals for aid at humanitarian compounds or – when support of humanitarian actors was not achieved or experienced – by pushing their local leaders to demand humanitarian assistance. In turn, local leaders directed those demands to either higher government officials or humanitarian actors.

In the meantime, the government continued to influence what humanitarian actors did both in and outside the camp. Local and district governments requested them to engage in development work outside the camp (e.g. construction and rehabilitation of roads, schools, health facilities, water system, donating cars to the government and police) and also instrumentalised the humanitarian operation by imposing conditions and restrictions on its modus operandi and by this, enforcing ‘compensation’. For instance, with past experiences of repatriation and its material benefits (e.g. the conversion of the Mtabila camp into military barracks) in mind, it was required that all camp structures built – and ideally even offices used – were to be permanent ones.⁴⁴ Paradoxically this encouraged the development of protracted camps and new approaches to refugee hosting,⁴⁵ and contributed to a significant change in the nature of humanitarianism from being a temporary emergency measure to one that carries long-term development potential.

Although humanitarian actors did not agree with all demands and requests, both national and local government used these to threaten to shrink asylum space would they not see the benefits of the humanitarian response.

These examples clearly reveal how government at all levels, could use asylum space as a trade-off to direct the spill-over. Landau already observed how, in the early days of the camp, the potential of humanitarian actors as key financiers of social and security services met the promises made by local and national political leaders to work for similar ‘development projects’ during their political campaigns.⁴⁶ Recent findings thus illustrate that the key brokering role of the government to arrange humanitarian support as one of its core functions, over time, became an institutionalized normality.

While it may appear as if humanitarian actors were subject to the instrumentalization of the government and host populations, the aid apparatus itself also hold strategic interests to further blend into the region. The increased focus on self-reliance and local integration as enabling a permanent solution, had grown in parallel with an emerging realization that the refugees from DRC, would not return home soon. Hence, including the host communities as a form of compensation and mitigation was an opportunity to negotiate and prepare the region for decampment. Coupled with the right political momentum, it was hoped this would attract new funding and approaches for a permanent, almost forgotten displacement crisis.

Tanzania became a pilot-country for the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) following the 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migration, which propagated a broader and more sustainable way to displacement, where both host communities and refugees would benefit from integrated service delivery. While the government pulled out of the CRRF in January 2018 due to funding disagreements,⁴⁷ it indicates how spill-overs of humanitarian governance finds its way into policy, and gradually moves from incidence to a more formalized approach.

The case of Kakuma: from mitigation to hybrid settlement

Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya started out as an emergency measure in 1992, but has developed into a quintessential example of the protracted refugee camp that becomes what Agier terms a ‘camp-city’.⁴⁸ Located in the semi-arid lands of the Turkana region in northern Kenya, by 2017 it was home to 170,000 refugees mainly from South Sudan, Somalia, DRC, Ethiopia, and other countries. It is emblematic of the apparent paradox of the protracted refugee camp that started as an emergency measure with its enduring perils and frustration on the one hand, and its longevity, development and normalization on the other.⁴⁹

As a result of its longevity and exposure, Kakuma has generated a wealth of literature and studies. These range from early accounts that highlighted concerns over violence, hardship and marginalization,⁵⁰ to reflections on the camp as a more ambiguous site of newness and alternative inclusion and sociability, and an emergent social form: something much more permanent, albeit with an enduring sense of uncertainty.⁵¹ The genre exemplifies how camps can develop over time, and how academic interpretation follows suit. Indeed the camp continues to grow,⁵² and mid-2019 the population stood at 192,167.⁵³

The camp has taken on an urban-like form, as a result of a ‘throwntogetherness’⁵⁴ of people, resources and activities, in a dense, non-agricultural, heterogeneous and largely informal settlement. This environment is shaped by the meeting of both curtailing and enabling forces. The camp as a ‘technology of control’⁵⁵ limits people’s room for manoeuvre in some areas, but supports and empowers in others. Moreover, people’s everyday manoeuvring between these curtailing and enabling forces, indicates how they make sense of life in and around the camp and how, for instance, economic life and the availability of education, create a sense of ‘normalcy’ in the everyday experience of camp inhabitants.⁵⁶ The refugee camp has developed from a temporary humanitarian measure into something resembling a shantytown, or urban setting in the desert, characterized by the availability of services such as education and healthcare, social change and a distinct humanitarian politics.⁵⁷

The impact of these developments had been felt in the areas around the camp. Already in the late 1990s, studies suggested that refugees had better access to public services and were better protected than the local Turkana population.⁵⁸ But it also became clear that rather than being separated, the camp and the host environment, were highly connected and dependent in terms of labour, resources and other inputs, in both formal and informal ways. At the same time the host environment became exposed to the services, education and processes of social change that spilled over from the camp into the region, hereby providing opportunities for Kenyans. Rather than the camp being a burden per se, empirical evidence suggests that the camp is largely beneficial for the lives and economy of local Kenyans beyond the camp.⁵⁹ As one Turkana suggested ‘if the Sudanese go, we’ll fly the Palestinians in’.⁶⁰

From the mitigation of insecurity to inclusion

Much of the spill-over in Kakuma can be attributed to humanitarian management measures that started out as a mitigation of insecurity and conflict by including the local Kenyan population in some aspects of refugee programming.⁶¹ This occurred through provisioning and supporting local government and police facilities, including cars, fuel and financial incentives. In addition, the camp’s medical and educational facilities were opened up to Kenyans, and needy locals in and around Kakuma town and the wider region were targeted as part of the regional periodic emergency food intervention scheme as well as in other, less planned ways.⁶²

In the history of the camp, humanitarian programming and, more in general, concerns of camp governance have come to strike multiple agendas simultaneously. For instance, the need for fuelwood for cooking in the camp highlighted a compounded stress: it fuelled animosity between refugees and the local population over access to and the depletion of natural resources; those collecting it, often women and children, were potentially exposed to aggression and sexual violence when venturing outside of the camp and it was, by and large, unsustainable and unhealthy to use stoves to cook. The concern for the environment can be seen as a mitigation of the stresses experienced by the local, mostly pastoralist, population as a result of the large concentration of people in the camp that needed access to water, wood and other natural resources in a dry and already vulnerable region. The ‘humanitarian bargain’, that Newhouse refers to as the ‘contract’ between refugees and the UN/local authorities to respect the rules of the camp⁶³ – i.e. refugees agree to be encamped in exchange for protection and services – is applicable here in another sense: in order for the Turkana not to disturb, harm or attack the camp, camp resources were also made available to them, and they were included in some aspects of humanitarian programming. The support of humanitarian actors for the local authorities, including the distribution of fuel, buildings, and salary top-ups to the police, and the mobile court and local administrators, should also be seen as a mitigation and a humanitarian bargain.⁶⁴

The camp contributed to the depletion of the environment, and specifically of natural bushland and trees not only because refugees came to collect it, but also because locals cut it, sold it as firewood or as building material, or made it into charcoal to sell in the camp. The response involved action at multiple levels. First, the humanitarian actors devised a strategy to tender the provision of firewood to local entrepreneurs, who were obliged to obtain their wood from far away so as not to harm the direct camp environment any further. After some time, the development agency GIZ started restocking the depleted environment, establishing and maintaining greenbelts around the camp. In addition, environmental awareness led to measures, also by other NGOs, such as the introduction of solar cookers and energy saving stoves, seedlings for reforestation, and the suggestion that refugee households use part of their daily water rations, or their household wastewater, to support at least one Neem tree on their plots. This restocking strategy also had a political and security rationale, to recompense for the erosion and damages done earlier.

Yet, as with many other aspects of refugee camp management, these measures also implicitly came to exert a spatial claim, by which the refugee programme and its aid actors started to impact on the broader environment beyond the ‘leased land’ of the camp, rather than merely those who fell into the category of being refugees. Some of these measures spilled over by policy, such as the greenbelts and the fire wood collection tenders, but others more by praxis, including the refugees’ own initiatives, some of which can be understood as environmental humanitarianism. Examples noted during fieldwork are anecdotal yet indicative, such as refugee initiatives to clean-up Kakuma town, and Turkana’s coming from up to 100 km to collect GIZ’s seedlings from its environmental programme. This added to the camp’s development potential, which not only materialized in economic, social, and political ways, but, in this case, also in an ecological one. Arguably, the spill-over from the camp means a subtle shift from humanitarianism towards a more general, long-term and hybrid development process and form of humanitarian governance.

Empowerment potential

A recent analysis of the effects and benefits of the camp’s presence on the socio-economic situation of the local Kenyan population notes that the camp’s infrastructure and economic spin-off contributed to closing the ‘development gap’ in the area.⁶⁵ The region of northern Turkana is considered marginalized as a result both of the colonial era and post-independence neglect of the largely nomadic-pastoralist population in the semi-arid border region.⁶⁶ When international aid actors came to this marginalized environment as part of the refugee project they started to contribute to public service delivery, provided economic opportunities and opened up other processes of change that also benefitted the non-refugee population. This was largely due to social and economic processes emanating from within the camp but also a response to the marginality of Turkanaland. Moves to address the development gap were not initially part of the camp’s remit but were introduced in order to mitigate stresses induced by the presence of the camp, including the informal and ad hoc social and economic relations between refugees, the local Turkana population, and other Kenyans. The effect of this has been that, over the years, the camp is increasingly seen as a (potential) booster of local development, an effect also noted with regards to the Dadaab camps, near the Somali border, in eastern Kenya and in other camp hosting regions in Uganda and Tanzania.⁶⁷ This unintentional developmental contribution represents another blurring of boundaries, between humanitarian and development agendas. In this sense the humanitarian spill-over also shows an empowerment potential, which enables people to use capacities and act on issues they define as important, or that become applicable and available as a result of long-term humanitarian presence and its effects.

Examples from recent UNHCR planning for Kakuma include the expansion of solar street lights for the host community (in partnership with IKEA), the preservation of vulnerable local flora, by selecting specific types of firewood (and leaving other species in place), a sustainable charcoal chain,⁶⁸ and an increase in reforestation through establishing and maintaining greenbelts. In effect then, the camp and it’s governance, as a curious mix of custody, care and control,⁶⁹ flows over, expanding its boundaries, combining caring for a specific category of people to also caring for the local community and the environment at large.

An indication of the coming to terms with the longevity, and perhaps the inevitability, of the camp, and as a recognition of the camp’s developmental effects on its surroundings is a new approach on encampment (or decampment – changing the vocabulary of ‘camps’ to ‘settlements’ in the process) that was articulated and implemented over the course of 2016, some 30 km to the north of Kakuma near a village called Kalobeyei. The approach is termed a ‘hybrid settlement’ by UNHCR, indicating a widening of the target group of refugee programming, and part of the CRRF that was established at the 2016 New York Declaration on Refugees and Migration. The notion of a hybrid settlement implies an attempt to address and benefit the lives of both local and refugee populations in terms of infrastructure, access to healthcare and other public services. The idea is that camps’ infrastructure, including schools, healthcare and leisure facilities, are constructed in durable ways, are used jointly, and can be handed over to the local community if and when the refugee programme ends. This approach requires closer collaboration between international actors and the Kenyan government (as well as the private sector) and a longer timeframe for setting up the investments indeed developing the refugee hosting region, in a longer term fashion, for instance by investing in the development of agriculture potential through irrigation schemes for the region.

This new approach marks the recognition of the viability of camp economies and the potential for the local population to participate in that process. This has already emerged de facto in and around Kakuma over the years, but it is now actively and officially promoted. This will partly be achieved by relying more on local enterprises to supply more of the camps’ basic needs and by providing refugees with cash and/or vouchers to access food rather than supplying them with rations of dry food. In a sense, the camp’s development and embeddedness, which were previously perceived as coincidental, or informal, now informs new and viable ways to re-invent long-term refugee hosting in camp-like structures.

In its conception, the Kalobeyei extension is a departure from the camp as an emergency measure for refugees towards an environment where a humanitarian rationale informs a much more viable, durable and enabling geography of care and control, which can only exist by including host populations and allowing these to co-shape the humanitarian project. At least, that is what is suggested in how the approach is articulated, since it remains to be seen the extent to which the settlement will materialize in the ways envisaged.⁷⁰

The Kalobeyei hybrid settlement initiative is presented as a settlement that is being developed to last until 2030, during which time Kenyans, Turkanas and refugees will share the basic infrastructure for development and opportunities for income generating activity.⁷¹ However, as the organic development of camps in Kenya in the past has shown, the eventual outcome may be quite different. The influx of South Sudanese refugees since 2016 has disrupted this initial agenda. Provision of emergency shelter gained precedence over a longer term approach⁷² – but the timeframe, planning cycle, and target group indicates a more structural, integrated, and developmental approach than in the past. More importantly, the idea of the Kalobeyei settlement is telling. It exemplifies the institutionalization of humanitarian governance with spill-over as intention, and indeed policy, rather than a side-effect.

Governance by intention, consequence or mitigation?

Our cases show assemblages of ideas and practices of a hybrid humanitarian governance that produces and maintains particular living spaces. Hybrid humanitarian governance implies a socio-spatial ordering, in which the state, UN, NGOs and peoples’ actions jointly exert and negotiate authority in changing fashions that are sometimes complementary and sometimes competing. As is increasingly recognized, power in camps is contested, multiple, and ambiguous.⁷³

Our cases illustrate, this power in camps, rather than being an exceptional, bounded, assemblage of authority, simultaneously implies processes of expansion, which departs from camps and increasingly moves beyond them to influence life in refugee hosting environments; this process is what we call the ‘humanitarian spill-over’. Newhouse notes that, if we are to understand, the ‘multi-scalar ways in which camp space is produced and enforced on the ground’ it is important to focus on the ‘everyday, embodied micro-political activities’ that produce the refugee camp environment.⁷⁴ In this paper, we have illustrated how these everyday micro-political activities spill-over from the camp and come to co-shape the host environment. This analysis underlines that humanitarian governance is hybrid in nature, but not only that, the findings imply that its hybridity expands and with time, becomes an institutionalized normality beyond the camp.

One of the ambiguities produced by this concern is the relation between humanitarian actors and the host state. Andersen has analysed post-conflict state building in Liberia and how the influence of the aid apparatus on local authorities and state actors took on a tacit form, in order not to undermine the legitimacy of the state, or conversely, to lose access as a result of a disgruntled state authority feeling threatened by an assertive intervening actor.⁷⁵ In the Kenyan case, the chronology of handing over refugee registration to the state has proven challenging, and there are examples of international agencies acting on behalf of the state in performing governmental tasks,⁷⁶ while conversely, the camps’ arrangement for security policing were co-opted by the state for its security and counter terrorism agenda.⁷⁷ International actors, including development and missionary groups, intervening in and around Kakuma have become an almost permanent influence in administering people and the environment in the area. They have become institutionalized as a substitute for the state which plays a limited role in the area but also operate in an ambiguous proxy role, as intermediaries between the state and its citizens, both controlling and empowering the role of the state in the area and being substitute service providers. Thus, and related to Andersen’s observation in Liberia, humanitarian actors both supported, empowered and substituted the state’s role.

Similar dynamics were found in the relationships between humanitarian agencies and the state in the Tanzanian case. Over time, humanitarian actors became increasingly involved in funding and working together with or through (local) government structures to provide services to the host population, with the government on its turn using humanitarian actors for political gain⁷⁸ and citizens – not putting ‘all their eggs in one basket’ – strategically and interchangeably navigating demands on both humanitarian actors and the state. The negotiation of humanitarian presence in Tanzania illustrates how hybrid humanitarian governance has become part of everyday life.

Refugee camps such as Kakuma and Nyarugusu, and others in similar long-term refugee hosting contexts, show how UNHCR, NGOs and other institutions within the camp ecology come to co-govern people outside of the initial humanitarian mandate by expanding the camp in both a symbolic and physical sense, and in both intended and unintended ways. It shows an empowerment potential – or a belief in one – as the socio-economic impact of such camps and the potential of its humanitarian entourage flows over, and blends in with the host regions. The camps’ routine humanitarian presence and the forms of governance this produces, come to influence the space and people beyond its strict boundaries, impacting state-society relations as tacit or explicit intermediary. This suggests that refugee protection, as provided through the underlying rationale of managing a physically demarcated space and an entitled target population, slowly shifts from focusing on refugee-centred needs within the camp, spilling over both organically and intentionally to involve a much broader spectrum of intervention, thereby including a wider range of people who become pseudo targets/beneficiaries. In this way, camps are implicitly and explicitly, posited as drivers for development.

This conclusion is relevant for other areas experiencing protracted refugee camp dynamics where humanitarian presence impacts on local environments in ways that influence socio-spatial relations and enable the development of local economies and infrastructure.⁷⁹ In this regard, the durable camp, hybrid settlement, or camp-city as a solution in itself aligns with a momentum for investments in, and new thinking about, alternatives to refugee camps. The embracing (or portraying) of camps such as Kakuma and Nyarugusu as socio-economic boosters in marginal, underdeveloped regions, where survival mechanisms and livelihoods are projected to become more stressed in the future,⁸⁰ is rather opportune and politically timely.

However, as we argue, it is also a recognition of the inevitable emergence of new social relations on the ground that have become increasingly visible and recognized, as exemplified through new experiments with hybrid settlements, including the Kalobeyei hybrid settlement plan, and related discussions amongst UN and aid actors regarding refugee camps in, for instance Jordan, Uganda and elsewhere.⁸¹ Approaching the camp and its embeddedness in a wider environment, allows us to recognize how camps are, and should be, about more than containment and separation, and how the outcomes of intended and unintended socio-spatial effects of the presence and actions of aid actors, local authorities, refugees and local people combine to create situations in which hybrid governance extends its influence across spatial, social and political boundaries.

Conclusion

This paper explored the expansion of humanitarian governance in two emblematic camp contexts in Tanzania and Kenya. We showed how these camps, its inhabitants and humanitarian entourage, and the local environment and its population, have become intertwined in cultural, economic, political and social ways. While the important socio-spatial effects of long-term humanitarian programming and presence are becoming more evident, the way that these effects become a form of governance of the hosting space, that broadens from a strict humanitarian or refugee rationale and influences everyday lives and practices of host populations and governments, is much more opaque.

In our two specific cases we argue that the influence and impact that emanates from the camp and blends into the region, evolves into a form of (co-) governance of the host region. This is of relevance in terms of the proliferation of camps as development processes, and an example of the micro-politics of humanitarian governance that spills over from its initial mandates into something new to enable and facilitate new ways of refugee hosting. Posting these processes as ‘humanitarian spill-over’ opens the way for analysing camps and the embeddedness in host societies as hybrid spaces, and for exploring how power processes and forms of hybrid humanitarian governance expand beyond the camp, influencing aspects of legitimacy, authority and belonging.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Agier, Un Monde de Camps; Vemuru et al., Refugee Impacts on Turkana Hosts; Oesch, “The Refugee Camp as a Space of Multiple Ambiguities.”

2 Agamben, State of Exception.

3 Janmyr and Knudsen, “Introduction: Hybrid Spaces”; Martin, “From Spaces of Exception to Campscapes”; Oesch, “The Refugee Camp as a Space of Multiple Ambiguities.”

4 Meiches, “A Political Ecology of the Camp.”

5 Smirl, Spaces of Aid.

6 Barnett, “Humanitarian Governance.”

7 For instance: Chambers, “Hidden Losers?”; Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid; Vemuru et al., Refugee Impacts on Turkana Hosts; Waters, “Assessing the Impact of the Rwandan Refugee Crisis”; Whitaker, “Refugees in Western Tanzania.”

8 Oesch, “The Refugee Camp as a Space of Multiple Ambiguities.”

9 Buscher and Vlassenroot, “Humanitarian Presence and Urban Development”; Meiches, “A Political Ecology of the Camp”; Smirl, Spaces of Aid; Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils.

10 Barnet, “Humanitarian Governance”; Williams, “From Humanitarian Exceptionalism to Contingent Care.”

11 Martin, “From Spaces of Exception to Campscapes”; Oesch, “The Refugee Camp as a Space of Multiple Ambiguities.”

12 Agier, Un Monde de Camps; Betts et al., Refugee Economies; Jacobsen, The Economic Life of Refugees.

13 Agamben, State of Exception; Agier and Bouchet-Saulnier, “Humanitarian Spaces”; Bauman, Wasted Lives.

14 See Chkam, “Aid and the Perpetuation of Refugee Camps” for an account about how NGOs perpetuate encampment.

15 Fresia and Von Känel, “Beyond Space of Exception?”; Jansen, Kakuma Refugee Camp; Sigona, “Campzenship”; Turner, “What is a Refugee Camp?”

16 Martin, “From Spaces of Exception to Campscapes.”

17 Meiches, “A Political Ecology of the Camp.”

18 Agamben, Homo Sacer; Bauman, Wasted Lives.

19 Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

20 Smirl, Spaces of Aid.

21 Chaulia, “The Politics of Refugee Hosting in Tanzania”; Landau, The Humanitarian Hangover.

22 Landau, The Humanitarian Hangover.

23 Chaulia, “The Politics of Refugee Hosting in Tanzania”; Milner, “Two Steps Forward.”

24 See UNHCR, “Refugee Situation Tanzania, Statistical Report 30 June 2017”: https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/58615

25 See for instance: Waters, “Assessing the Impact of the Rwandan Refugee Crisis”; Malkki, “Refugees and Exile”; Whitaker, “Refugees in Western Tanzania”; Chaulia, “The Politics of Refugee Hosting”; Berry, “The Impact of Environmental Degradation on Refugee-Host Relations”; Alix-Garcia and Saah, “The Effect of Refugee Inflows on Host Communities”; Landau, The Humanitarian Hangover; Turner, “The Barriers of Innocence”; Morel, “The Lack of Refugee Burden-Sharing in Tanzania”; Milner, “Two Steps Forward”; Fresia and Von Känel, “Beyond Space of Exception?”

26 Landau, The Humanitarian Hangover.

27 See for instance Agier, Managing the Undesirables.

28 Feldman, “Humanitarian Refusals.”

29 Agier, “Humanity as an Identitiy.”

30 UNHCR, “Burundi Regional Refugee Response Plan – 2015,” 46.

31 Makere/Kalimungoma/Kasulu/Nyarugusu village December 2016–March 2017, interviews with farmers, local drivers’ aid agencies, farmers, aid workers, local government officials, school teachers and church leaders. See De Bruijne, Negotiating Borders of Exception.

32 Makere/Kalimungoma/Kasulu/Nyarugusu village-camp, issues with natural resources came up in 19 interviews with citizens, government officials and aid workers. See De Bruijne, Negotiating Borders of Exception. See also: UNHCR, “Burundi Regional Refugee Response Plan – 2017”; Whitaker, “Refugees in Western Tanzania”; Berry, “The Impact of Environmental Degradation on Refugee-Host Relations.”

33 Kasulu, March 2017, interview district official. See also: UNDP, Tanzania Human Development Report 2014.

34 Kasulu, January 2017, interview CEMDO programme manager; Kasulu, February 2017, interview WFP Head of Sub-office. See also: UNICEF, “Final Report. Evaluation of Tanzania UNDAP 2011–2016.”

35 Initiated by CARE and UNHCR as early as 2001.

36 A mayor of a ward surrounding Nyarugusu camp recalled how the surrounding communities threatened to expel humanitarian organisations should they not see positive impacts of their presence.

37 Turner, “Under the Gaze of the ‘Big Nations,’” 227.

38 Smirl, Spaces of Aid.

39 Kasulu, February 2017, interview WFP Head of Sub-office; March 2017, interview Camp Manager TWESA (local Tanzanian organisations and UNHCR lead partner for Camp Management and Coordination); Kasulu, December 2016, participant observation; I stayed in the same guesthouse as Oxfam employees and observed and spoke to one employee helping a Masaai writing a proposal for his local development organisation in Mwanza. See also: Landau, the Humanitarian Hangover.

40 Nyarugusu village, March 2017, focus group discussion with community.

41 Makere, February 2018, interview mayor; Kasulu, February 2017, interview WFP Head of Sub-office.

42 Kasulu, January 2017, interview with retired civil servant.

43 Kasulu, February 2017, interview employee Good Neighbours.

44 Kasulu, February 2017, interview WFP Head of Sub-office; informal conversation employee UNHCR; Kasulu District official; Nyarugusu refguee camp, January 2017, MSF field coordinator.

45 As observed during field visits to Zaatari camp, Jordan, in 2016 and 2018, where this was proposed as new scenario for refugee hosting by the VNGi and the Municipality of Amsterdam.

46 Landau, The Humanitarian Hangover, 145.

47 Fellesson, “From Roll-Out to Reverse.”

48 Agier, Managing the Undesirables.

49 Jansen, Kakuma Refugee Camp.

50 Crisp, “A State of Insecurity”; Kagwanja and Juma, “Somali Refugees: Protracted Exile and Shifting Security Frontiers.”

51 Newhouse, “More than Mere Survival”; Oka, “Unlikely Cities in the Desert”; Brankamp, Refugees in Uniform.

52 With the exception of a decrease after the initial repatriation of Sudanese to South Sudan around 2008/2009, and other occasional fluctuations.

53 See UNHCR update Kakuma. Total Population as of 31st July 2019: https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/70776

54 Massey, For Space.

55 Hyndman, Managing Displacement.

56 Newhouse, “More than Mere Survival”; Oka, “Unlikely Cities in the Desert.”

57 Jansen, Kakuma Refugee Camp.

58 Aukot, “It is Better to be a Refugee than a Turkana in Kakuma”; Otha, “Coexisting with Cultural ‘Others.’”

59 Sanghi, Onder, and Veremu, “Yes” in my Backyard?; Vemuru et al., Refugee Impacts on Turkana Hosts.

60 Jansen, Kakuma Refugee Camp, 16.

61 Kakuma, interview UNHCR head of security, see Jansen, Kakuma Refugee Camp, 17; and Loescher and Milner, “Protracted Refugee Situations,” 354.

62 LWF-EMOP (Emergency Operations) is a collaboration between LWF, OXFAM and WFP for distributing relief in the wider Turkana region, which was located in LWF’s Kakuma compound. Over the years emergency food relief operations have taken on a recurring and chronic character in northern Turkana.

63 Newhouse, “More than Mere Survival.”

64 See also Jansen, Kakuma Refugee Camp.

65 Vemuru et al., Refugee Impacts on Turkana Hosts.

66 Carr, River Basin Development.

67 Betts et al., Refugee Economies; Enghoff, In Search of Protection; Jacobsen, The Economic Life of Refugees.

68 The invasive Prosopis Juliflora, rather than from indigenous plants, that were diminishing due to widespread chopping of trees in the vicinity of Kakuma. See also: http://www.irinnews.org/feature/2017/12/28/kenya-s-drought-solution-becomes-major-menace-once-again.

69 Minca, “Geographies of the Camp.”

70 See i.e. ‘Development of Kalobeyei Refugee Settlement’, 2016 KCRP Consultation of 8 Dec 2015, UNHCR Regional Support Hub (internal document) and the Regional Development and Protection Program by the Dutch MoFA and other online sources (such as: http://www.unhcr.org/ke/2078-unique-eu-programme-to-benefit-refugees-and-host-communities-in-kalobeyei.html). See also, UNHCR, “Kenya Comprehensive Refugee Programme.”

71 UNHCR, “Kenya Comprehensive Refugee Programme.”

72 As observed and recorded by L. De Jong, during graduate fieldwork with Wageningen University in 2017.

73 Brankamp, “Refugees in Uniform”; Oesch, “The Refugee Camp as a Space of Multiple Ambiguities”; Turner, “What is a Refugee Camp?”; Janmyr and Knudsen, “Introduction: Hybrid Spaces.”

74 Newhouse, “More than Mere Survival,” 4.

75 Andersen, “Statebuilding as Tacit Trusteeship.”

76 Kagwanja and Juma, “Somali Refugees”; Lindley, “Between a Protracted and a Crisis Situation.”

77 Brankamp, Refugees in Uniform.

78 See also Landau, The Humanitarian Hangover.

79 See for instance, Büscher and Vlassenroot, “Humanitarian Presence and Urban Development”; De Bruijne, Negotiating Borders of Exception.

80 Carr, River Bain Development.

81 Personal communications, internal background documents and workshop participation related to the Al Zaatari project with the Municipality of Amsterdam (since 2014); related to various communications, internal documents, workshops and consultations on the Regional Development and Protection Programme for the Horn of Africa, implemented by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (since 2016).