Quiet Inclusion: Essays on the Political Economy of Refugee Integration in Africa

Abstract

There are more than 120 million forcibly displaced people in the world today. Approximately 85 percent of refugees are hosted in the Global South and more than half are children. In Africa, the average length of displacement exceeds 25 years representing protracted scenarios in which many are displaced for their entire school-age and/or working life. In contrast to countries in the Global North, it is less common for host countries in the Global South to automatically integrate refugees into national services like health and education upon admission. Instead, refugees have historically been segregated into parallel systems managed by non-state providers or otherwise granted limited inclusion. As the scale and length of displacement continues to grow around the world, however, host governments face dilemmas – often characterized by pressure from international actors – about whether and how to integrate refugees into national services, labor markets, and broader social, economic, and political life. In this dissertation, I present three essays focused on the political economy of refugee integration in national systems in Africa. I frame refugee integration as a distinct political economy challenge shaped by uncertainty, contested responsibility, and divergent incentives across transnational, national, and local interests. Refugees test the limits of state obligation: they are inside national borders but outside political membership. In the first essay co-authored with Sarah Dryden-Peterson, I argue that traditional political economy frameworks explaining when and why states invest in public services for citizens breakdown when applied to refugees due to uncertainty about refugee futures and the state’s ability to realize returns on investment. By centering “responsibility” as an analytic category, I illuminate how domestic actors, donors, and international agencies negotiate power, incentives, and accountability in ways that diverge from models based on citizen populations. When responsibility for refugee education is contested and refugee futures in the host country are uncertain, I argue that host governments have limited incentives to formalize integration in de jure laws and policies. In the second essay, I introduce the concept of quiet inclusion to describe a phenomenon in which the de facto inclusion of refugees in public services exceeds what is protected de jure. I measure de facto integration across 24 countries in Africa and find that quiet inclusion can be a strategic solution for host governments facing dilemmas related to integration in constrained policy environments. I use insights from the cross-national analysis to design a vignette survey experiment with elites in Kenya and find that preferences for quiet inclusion hold at micro-level when relevant conditions which characterize the dilemmas elites face are made salient in the vignette scenarios. In the third essay, I field a framing and conjoint survey experiment with public school teachers and host parents in Kenya and find that the nature and severity of attitudes toward refugee integration varies considerably between Kenya’s two prominent refugee hosting regions. In Dadaab, attitudes toward inclusion are more likely to be driven by prejudice whereas attitudes in Kakuma are more likely to be driven by concerns about the effort and material conditions associated with integration. These findings highlight that integration in policy environments governed by quiet inclusion are likely to be characterized by considerable sub-national variation stemming in part from the attitudes and motivations of local actors who act as street-level bureaucrats to shape the day-to-day boundaries of inclusion. The frameworks and findings I present have broader relevance for understanding how marginalized populations access public goods in contexts shaped by global inequality. Perhaps most importantly, I find that efforts to formalize integration characterized by quiet inclusion can backfire resulting in less inclusion than what was possible through de facto channels when advocates fail to take seriously the strategic nature of deviations between de jure and de facto policies.