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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2021
The Dollo Ado refugee camps, located close to the Ethiopian-Somali border, have been a major focus for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR)'s attempts to build livelihoods for refugees and the host community. The context presents an analytical puzzle: despite the importance of cross-border activity to refugees’ socioeconomic lives, such transnational activity has been institutionally invisible to and hindered by the international agencies seeking to assist them. The article explores how and why refugees’ cross-border activities have been systematically ignored by international institutions. As a theoretical starting point, it draws upon the post-development literature, and notably the work of James Ferguson, which explores how international institutions frequently misunderstand the agency and strategies of their subject populations. However, contra Ferguson's predominantly Foucauldian methodological and epistemologically approach, the article adopts a mixed methods approach, and emphasises the agency of aid workers, bureaucratic politics, and political economy in its account of the disjuncture between international institutions’ state-centric livelihoods programmes and refugees’ own cross-border economic strategies.
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19 Monsutti, War and Migration; Monsutti, Afghan Transnational Networks.
20 Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine.
21 Ibid.
22 Kate Long, ‘In search of sanctuary: Border closures, “safe” zones and refugee protection’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 26:3 (2013), pp. 458–76.
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26 Scott, Seeing Like a State.
27 Michael Barnett, ‘Humanitarianism, paternalism and the UNHCR’, in Alexander Betts and Gil Loescher (eds), Refugees in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 105–32.
28 Pincock et al., The Global Governed?.
29 Barnett, ‘Humanitarianism, paternalism and the UNHCR’, p. 105.
30 Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine.
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32 See Lauren Carruth, ‘Kinship, nomadism, and humanitarian aid among Somalis in Ethiopia’, Disasters, 42:1 (2018), pp. 149–68.
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43 Desert Rose Consulting, Consulting Report: UNHCR, Kobe Camp, Dolo Ado (Addis Ababa: Desert Rose Consulting, 2012).
44 Tobias Hagmann and Mustafe Mohamed Abdi, ‘Inter-Ethnic Violence in Ethiopia's Somali Regional State, 2017–2018’, Briefing Paper (London: LSE, Conflict Research Programme, 2020).
45 Alexander Betts, Leon Fryszer, Naohiko Omata, and Olivier Sterck, ‘Refugee Economies in Addis Ababa: Towards Sustainable Opportunities for Urban Communities?’ (Oxford: Refugee Studies Centre, 2019).
46 UNHCR, Briefing Note on Melkadida (UNHCR: Melkadida, Ethiopia, 2018).
47 IKEA Foundation, Dollo Ado (Leiden: IKEA Foundation, 2018).
48 For an impact evaluation of the programmes, see Betts, Alexander, Marden, Andonis, Bradenbrink, Raphael, and Kaufmann, Jonas, ‘Building Refugee Economies: An Evaluation of the IKEA Foundation's Programmes in Dollo Ado’ (Oxford: Refugee Studies Centre, 2020)Google Scholar.
49 UNHCR commissioned some ‘baseline’ studies, such one by the consultancy company FHI-360 but the methods used meant that the data could ultimately not be used as baseline data to evaluate any of the specific programme interventions. Within our interviews, many of the UNHCR staff involved in Dollo Ado acknowledge an under-investment in research, data collection, and monitoring and evaluation planning throughout the design of the Dollo Ado programmes.
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59 Somali region has nine zones. In each zone, there is an inhabiting ethnic leader who controls the area. In Liban zone, it is king Abdilee. According to local authorities in Dollo Ado town, in this Somali-Ethiopian area, the king is not the regional government of Somali region. Rather he is a tribal leader who represents customary clan and ethic structure.
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