From Bottom-Up to Top-Down: The 'Pre-History' of Refugee Livelihoods Assistance from 1919 to 1979

Abstract

This article draws upon grey literature and archival materials to compare and contrast refugee livelihoods assistance in the
interwar period (1919–39) and the post-war period (1945–79). It argues that the interwar period featured ‘bottom-up’ policies
and practices of the League of Nations, while the post-war period was characterized by technocratic, authoritarian approaches
to refugee livelihoods and development by institutions such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Refugee livelihoods were incorporated and accommodated for as a central element
of League relief efforts before World War II, but the implementation of similar assistance practices in the following period
excluded refugees’ own livelihoods strategies and skills. The article concludes by discussing the relevance of further historical
research in Refugee Studies as the current use of the term ‘innovation’ is ahistorical, and many contemporary livelihood practices
operating under the auspices of ‘innovation’ have in reality been employed since the beginning of the international refugee
regime.

Full text

From Bottom-Up to Top-Down: The
‘Pre-History’ of Refugee Livelihoods
Assistance from 1919 to 1979
EVAN ELISE EASTON-CALABRIA
Humanitarian Innovation Project
1
, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford,
Oxford, UK
evan.eastoncalabria@gmail.com,evanec@uw.edu
MS received September 2014; revised MS received January 2015
This article draws upon grey literature and archival materials to compare and
contrast refugee livelihoods assistance in the interwar period (1919–39) and the
post-war period (1945–79). It argues that the interwar period featured ‘bottom-
up’ policies and practices of the League of Nations, while the post-war period
was characterized by technocratic, authoritarian approaches to refugee liveli-
hoods and development by institutions such as the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP). Refugee livelihoods were incorporated and accommo-
dated for as a central element of League relief efforts before World War II,
but the implementation of similar assistance practices in the following period
excluded refugees’ own livelihoods strategies and skills. The article concludes by
discussing the relevance of further historical research in Refugee Studies as the
current use of the term ‘innovation’ is ahistorical, and many contemporary
livelihood practices operating under the auspices of ‘innovation’ have in reality
been employed since the beginning of the international refugee regime.
Keywords: Refugee livelihoods, refugee assistance, League of Nations, history in
Refugee Studies
Introduction
[T]hrown almost naked on the shores of Greece, [refugees] have displayed such
an industrious and active spirit that they are nearly all able today to earn their
own livelihood without any help from the Greek Government or any other
source.
So reads a 1926 ‘Foreign Affairs’ article detailing the success of the first
international institutional response to refugees (Howland 1926: 622–623).
Refugees’ ‘morale and their scale of living rise visibly month by month,
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and their asset value to Greece increases in proportion to the decrease of their
miseries’ (ibid.). In the face of the protracted refugee situations of today, such
a statement seems a dream. Just as remarkable is the under-explored liveli-
hoods promotion discussed, which emerged long before the concept of ‘refu-
gee livelihoods’ entered the Refugee Studies lexicon. However, in contrast to
the concept’s contemporary currency, a dearth of historical literature on the
topic has led to an ahistorical conceptualization of refugee livelihoods and the
assistance surrounding them, reflecting a larger lacuna of historical literature
in Refugee Studies
2
(Crisp 2003: 223).
‘Refugee livelihoods’, defined by United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) as the means through which refugees ‘secure the basic
necessities of life, such as food, water, shelter and clothing’ (UNHCR 2014:
7), have been increasingly discussed in the last 15 years as a means to achieve
local integration through self-reliance. Despite the term being criticized for
lacking a coherent definition (De Vriese 2006: 1), the salience of refugee
livelihoods is clear, having emerged as a main topic within debates surround-
ing rights-based approaches (Crisp 2003), urban support programmes (FIC
2012) and microfinance for refugees (Bartsch 2004; Foy 2006). Between 2000
and 2009, approximately 12,000 pieces of literature by academics and prac-
titioners discussed refugee livelihoods—over double the number published the
decade prior (ProQuest 2014). From 2010 to 2012, UNHCR’s budget for
Livelihood Programming increased by 66 per cent (UNHCR 2012: 14).
3
The UNHCR’s Livelihoods Unit, only established in 2008, focuses on
‘vocational and skills training, promoting entrepreneurship, supporting agri-
culture, livestock and fisheries, and strengthening access to financial services
or microfinance’ (UNHCR 2014: 14). These have been labelled ‘innovative’ in
development literature (IFAD 2003; Foy 2006; IRC 2012), yet historical
examination reveals that these assistance practices have occurred since the
first international institutional responses to refugees by the League of Nations
(hereafter, the League), in the 1920s. As this article discusses, these practices
have remained largely consistent from the 1920s up to today, as have inter-
national institutions’ and host governments’ aims for refugee assistance to
lead to both refugee self-sufficiency and host country economic development.
Further documentation and analysis of this history are important, for gaps in
historical knowledge and institutional memory have resulted in an inability to
identify true innovations, protracted challenges, and best practices in refugee
livelihoods assistance.
In this article, I aim to situate refugee livelihoods assistance in a historical
framework by reviewing its ‘pre-history’ and discussing changes and conti-
nuities between 1919 and 1979, as well as varying social, economic and pol-
itical contexts influencing assistance and perceptions of refugees. Despite
similar objectives and practices of refugee assistance throughout this time,
the participatory and often successful settlement of refugees occurring in the
interwar years did not happen after World War II. I argue that there was a
diachronic shift in the structure and implementation of refugee livelihoods
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assistance. This changed from a ‘bottom-up’ refugee livelihoods assistance
approach during the interwar years to a ‘top-down’, largely authoritarian
approach that was solidified after World War II as UNHCR and other de-
velopment institutions opened operations in Africa. Concomitant with this
shift was a changed institutional conceptualization of refugees as workers in
need of resettlement to victims in need of comprehensive assistance.
Here, ‘bottom-up’ assistance refers to relief and development efforts built
out of and upon the self-defined needs and interests of affected populations,
which thus directly engages them in decision-making capacities. Examples of
bottom-up strategies that defined the League’s refugee assistance include the
incorporation of refugees in higher consultative and representative roles, such
as delegates of the Nansen Office, as well as settling refugees in rural or
urban areas based on past livelihoods and environs. However, as Skran
(1995) discusses, the League’s relief model cannot be defined as refugee-
centric, for European representatives still controlled the funding channels
and ultimate decision-making processes. The approaches this term encom-
passes, however, still contrast with the restrictive structures of post-war de-
velopment projects run by the UN and other institutions. I define these as
‘top-down’, referring to situations of encampment, forced farming and other
authoritarian practices that led refugees to have little say in deciding upon or
implementing settlement structures, policies or livelihoods programmes.
My time frame is bounded by the formation of the League of Nations in
1919 and the Pan-African Conference on the Situation of Refugees in Africa
(Arusha Conference)
4
in 1979. The League became the first international
institutional mechanism to address mass displacement, largely through seek-
ing opportunities for refugees to contribute to host country development. It
constitutes the first international refugee regime (Skran 1995) and all further
(Western) international responses to displacement, particularly those of the
UN, have in some form built off the League’s experience. Dividing history
into periods is always a crude endeavour, but the Arusha Conference is an
important landmark due to it beginning the International Conference on
Assistance to Refugees in Africa (ICARA) ‘process’
5
occurring in the 1980s
(Stein 1997; Crisp 2001; Betts 2004). This process focused on alleviating host
country burden-sharing by increasing refugees’ contributions to host country
national development and culminated in a ‘new’ strategy called ‘Refugee Aid
and Development’ (RAD) that has appeared under other names in the last 25
years.
6
As RAD is rarely attributed to decades prior to the 1960s (Crisp 2003;
Horst 2006), the Arusha Conference is considered the basis for programmes
targeting refugee livelihoods through national development (Lui 2008), des-
pite the fact that these had already occurred during the previous 20 years of
refugee assistance in Africa (Gorman 1986) and 50 years of European assist-
ance (Skran 1995).
Although assistance practices before and after 1979 were similar, their level
of documentation was not. Scant academic literature on refugee assistance
existed prior to the creation of Refugee Studies in the early 1980s, and the
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prolific academic engagement on the linkage between refugee aid and devel-
opment primarily began after the Arusha Conference (Chambers 1979, 1982;
Stein 1982; Gorman 1986). It is not the aim of this article to review the
abundant literature focusing on this topic from 1979 onwards, for the history
of refugee assistance since the 1980s is well documented.
7
Instead, as histor-
ical enterprises on refugee assistance have rarely expanded to periods preced-
ing the 1980s, my aim is to elucidate the comparatively neglected ‘pre-history’
of refugee livelihoods assistance from the interwar years up to 1979.
Beginning with 1920s Europe and moving to post-colonial East Africa, this
article shifts continents much as the refugee regime did, following both refu-
gee flows and the interests of dominant states and institutional actors. In
particular, I document the shifting structure and administration of refugee
settlement and how refugee livelihoods were addressed by main institutional
actors between 1919 and 1979, primarily the League, UNHCR, the United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the International Labour
Organisation (ILO). Refugee assistance is necessarily embedded within
larger humanitarian and development events and trends. Varying modes of
programme implementation and settlement regulations were not enacted in
silos but are instead entwined with changing development agendas, host
country policies towards refugees, the interests of international aid agencies
such as the League and UNHCR, and emerging international norms regard-
ing the role of states in providing welfare. Refugee livelihoods assistance
therefore embodies an important intersection of broader debates concerning
the meaning and aims of humanitarian practice, and gaps between emergency
relief and rehabilitation and development. Situating it accordingly helps to
explain some of its changes.
The first section of this article describes the dominant approach to refugee
settlement and livelihoods assistance in the interwar years by the League and
ILO. The second section examines assistance practices in the post-war period
between 1945 and 1979, primarily discussing the exclusive livelihoods assist-
ance and top-down structure of often jointly led UNHCR, UNDP and ILO
settlements created for the ‘new refugees’ in Africa. The final section reviews
the changes and consistencies in assistance practices throughout these periods,
and discusses the relevance of these findings to current debates on innovation
in refugee livelihoods assistance today.
Methods and Sources
Following Arksey and O’Malley (2005), I employed a scoping study method-
ology for this research to map available literature underpinning the concept
of refugee livelihoods and refugee livelihoods assistance between 1919 and
1979.
8
Scoping studies are often part of a longer process of systematic review
and are useful when an undefined amount of evidence exists (Levac et al.
2010). When it became clear that relevant historical documentation was pre-
sent in non-digitized archives, I also examined so-called ‘grey’ literature.
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Primary literature consulted includes documents from the League, UN and
ILO archives, as well as the University of Oxford Refugee Studies Centre
Betts Collection, comprising the formerly classified reports and private docu-
ments of Tristam F. Betts, a leading Africanist in the field of refugees in the
1960s and 1970s and former Oxfam Field Director for East Africa. Despite
their availability in archives, many of these personal and technical documents
by development workers and long-standing institutional entities are non-
digitized, and are therefore not easily accessible and have been unexamined
for content involving refugee livelihoods. Altogether, a total of 312 items
comprising books (38), research articles (129), institutional reports (134)
and private documents (11) were collected and examined in the course of
the study between August 2013 and June 2014.
Bottom-Up Assistance in the Interwar Period: 1919–39
The League of Nations and Refugees
The establishment of the formal commission on the League of Nations on 25
January 1919 provided an unprecedented basis for international cooperation
and oversight as well as the first attempts by an international body to re-
spond to mass displacement. The League was formed with the primary goal
of maintaining peace, for the countries comprising it had in many cases been
devastated by World War I. With the League’s creation, states envisaged a
security system to prevent war by increasing international dialogue, account-
ability and upholding newly drawn state lines, even condoning forced dis-
placement through population exchanges to adhere to these borders.
In 1921, the League of Nations created the High Commission for Refugees
(hereafter, the High Commission), in part to diminish to the perceived threat
of European destabilization posed by displaced people. Approximately nine
to 10 million refugees were in Europe during the interwar period (Marrus
1985: 51); those supported by the League included Russians, Greeks,
Armenians, Bulgarians, Turks, Saarlaenders and Jewish, mainly German,
citizens (Fanshawe and Macartney 1933; Skran 1995: 9). Due to social and
political trends, internal funding constraints, and a lack of prior experience in
refugee assistance, League assistance strategies emphasized bottom-up meth-
ods and refugees’ capacity to contribute to independent national commissions
and rehabilitation through their own expertise as well as financial means. The
promotion of refugee self-sufficiency and professional skills meant that refu-
gees became employed in settlement commissions, served as delegates of the
High Commission and even funded other refugees’ settlements through
microfinance.
The end of World War I and the interwar years constituted a continuous
era of humanitarian efforts based on states’ developing but still nascent pro-
pensity to take responsibility for populations in need and respond through
international coordination and organizations (Barnett 2011: 87). Overall, this
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period saw an increased role of the state in citizens’ lives, a stronger concep-
tion of welfare and clearer state obligations to citizens (Barnett 2011). The
provision of material assistance to refugees was innovative for the time and
‘League initiatives in helping refugees achieve self-sufficiency were a dramatic
departure from the past’ (Skran 1985: 113). Throughout this era, welfare
provision by states was largely unfamiliar, and they maintained an overall
ethos of self-reliance for citizens as well as refugees. This was also evidenced
within the League; the High Commission, renamed the Nansen International
Office for Refugees in the 1930s, had a strict ‘no-charity’ philosophy and
conceptualized refugees as an economic and ‘technical’ problem with eco-
nomic solutions
9
(ILO 1928). This was enabled through the common nat-
uralization of refugees at the time, which significantly reduced barriers to
accessing work. The League’s doctrine of refugee self-reliance persisted into
the 1930s, reflecting the tenets of state non-interference regarding citizen
welfare.
The no-charity philosophy of the League also stemmed from the
Commission’s own financial constraints and its mandate to coordinate
rather than implement programmes. Refugees were originally assumed to
be an ephemeral phenomenon, and the Commission was only meant to be
temporary (LN 1934: 66). The High Commission, and later Nansen Office,
had to fight to remain in existence up to the start of World War II (Hansson
1938). Indeed, both offices rarely received more than 1 per cent of the
League’s budget (Johnson 1938: 207) and thus faced a challenging lack of
funding. Due to this and a dearth of prior experience, the League’s refugee
relief efforts were largely ad hoc trials (Housden 2012: 59), which became
increasingly orchestrated in the late 1930s. The initial provisional nature of
assistance facilitated accommodating policies regarding refugee livelihoods
and self-sufficiency in rehabilitation and settlement efforts.
The Advent of Refugee Aid and Development
When one examines League documents on refugee assistance, it is quickly
apparent that main League strategies for peace—supporting refugees and
promoting economic and social stabilization—merged through refugee reset-
tlement projects. The League utilized and fostered refugee livelihoods as a
means to attain refugee self-sufficiency and the national economic stability of
host countries, even to the point of including refugee settlement into national
reconstruction schemes (LN 1945: 27). Refugees were regularly employed in
large-scale agricultural and government-sponsored public work projects, such
as draining marshes and building roads. In this way, they provided desired
labour for urban as well as rural development (ILO 1926; Pentzopoulos 2002:
115). Notably, the rural settlements in the 1920s were the first attempts to
undertake integrated development programmes that targeted locals as well as
refugees, which became known in the 1980s as ‘Refugee Aid and
Development’ and in the 2000s as ‘Development Assistance for Refugees’.
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The efforts of the first League-sponsored national commission established
in a host country, Greece, evince the dominant participatory rehabilitation
and development approach to refugee livelihoods at the time. Emblematic of
the League’s overall approach to assistance, the Greek Refugee Settlement
Commission (GRSC) had the sole and immediate aim of settling and foster-
ing the self-reliance of the approximately 1.5 million ethnic Greek refugees
forced out of Asia Minor and into Greece between 1922 and 1924. Like later
programmes implemented in the 1920s and 1930s, the Commission was for-
bidden to use funds on relief. The GRSC maintained a close connection to
the national government, almost all GRSC staff were Greek and Henry
Morgenthau, the first Chairman, stipulated that all posts should be given
to Greek refugees (Skran 1985: 179). Due to its success, the GRSC became
a model for refugee settlements, replicated in further refugee crises in
Bulgaria, Syria and Lebanon. In Bulgaria between 1926 and 1933, for ex-
ample, approximately 125,000 refugees were established by a national
Commission through rural development that included building roads, clearing
land and providing refugee farmers with tools and seeds (Skran 1985: 49).
Successful refugee settlements in the interwar period occurred through
integrated rural development projects supporting refugee rehabilitation and
host country economies through agricultural production (Mears 1929; LN
1933; Skran 1995). In addition to physical labour provided by refugees, de-
velopment occurred through commissions’ provision of new tools and agri-
cultural methods. Of Greece, Mears writes:
Better breeds of livestock are being introduced, and nomadic shepherds are
being replaced by stock breeders who raise forage crops on their own land.
Fallowing has given place to artificial fertilization, and new tools supplied by
the Refugee Settlement Commission are gradually causing the peasants to dis-
card antiquated methods of agriculture (Mears 1929: 279).
For homesteading families, the Commission provided tools, animals and
seeds for one year, as well as created infrastructure such as schools, hospitals
and model farms that also assisted local Greeks (Skran 1989: 178). A 1933
League pamphlet discusses a colony of 15 villages created to settle 15,000
refugees, mainly farmers. Refugees lived in tents until material to build huts
was provided. In addition to farms, cottage industries such as charcoal burn-
ing and carpet weaving were created and, by the end of the first year after
resettlement, the majority of refugees had become entirely self-reliant
(LN 1933: 72–73). Overall, by 1931, 650,000 people (approximately half of
the refugees) had been settled and 2,000 agricultural colonies and urban
quarters had been built around Greece (Skran 1985: 48).
Although the GRSC emphasized rural development assistance to refugees,
a quarter of the budget was devoted to urban settlements, with ‘refugees
ma[king] up ninety percent of the labour force involved in constructing
urban housing’ (Skran 1985: 179). Where urban resettlement was an
option, relocated urban dwellers had increased opportunities to continue
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their past professions and utilize financial and trading skills (Housden 2012:
70). A League report recalling the Greek refugees stated ‘The famous Smyrna
carpet industry has now moved bodily, with the men who used to practice it,
from Smyrna to the Piraeus’ (LN 1934: 74). In this way, refugee agency was
promoted with results that also benefitted Greece’s economy. Due to the
success of this approach in Greece, settling refugees in both urban and
rural areas became the status quo in countries such as Bulgaria and Lebanon.
The Centrality of Refugee Livelihoods: ‘Employment-Matching’ and
Refugee-Funded Microfinance
A main reason accounting for the centrality of refugee livelihoods in reset-
tlement in the 1920s and into the 1930s was the treatment of refugees as
labour migrants rather than subjects—or masses—of humanitarian need.
Rehabilitation efforts therefore continued to correspond to states’ growing
but still limited perception of responsibility towards both nationals and refu-
gees. Although the Greek settlement was considered a success, refugees in
countries like Lebanon and Syria struggled to find employment (Migliorino
2008: 75–77); by 1924, it had become clear that the refugee ‘problem’ was not
a temporary one and that ‘in the main their problem was to find work, or
have it found for them’ (LN 1933: 67). In response, the ILO was incorporated
into refugee relief and rehabilitation efforts to address ‘the employment, emi-
gration and settlement of refugees’ (ILO 1928: 68). From 1925 to 1929, ILO
facilitated the technical aspects of refugee emigration, including transporta-
tion. Its efforts in refugee settlement illustrate the centrality of refugees’
existing livelihoods in assistance strategies, and the dominant perception of
refugees as individual workers with specific skill sets. ILO initiated a success-
ful ‘employment-matching scheme’ through asking European countries about
their needs for foreign employment in order to place skilled refugees, largely
based on their existing livelihoods, into suitable positions. ILO, as well as
charities, provided oversight in the resettlement process in an effort to pre-
vent the exploitation of refugees. Fifty thousand refugees, mainly from
China and European countries, were employed through this endeavour,
which proved both cost-effective and successful in enabling refugee self-
reliance (ILO 1928: 84–85). By 1929, ILO had notably reduced the number
of able-bodied refugees seeking employment from 400,000 to 200,000 (Skran
1985: 205).
The dominant perception of refugees’ own capability is further seen
through their financial contribution to settlement. By the late 1930s, the
main source of income for the Nansen Office was provided by refugees them-
selves through a fee of five gold Francs for the Nansen passport, the identity
travel document for refugees designed by Nansen in 1922. With these fees, the
so-called Nansen Stamp Fund was created—a revolving fund providing loans
to refugees that were repaid as they established themselves (LN 1934: 69).
This ultimately ‘formed a nucleus of a humanitarian fund large enough to
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help refugees become self-supporting’ (Skran 1989: 206). The system of revol-
ving funds was integral to creating Armenian settlements in Syria and
Lebanon, and money donated to the settlements was loaned to refugees
with a high success rate of repayment (Skran 1995: 181–182). In the 1930s,
small loans to establish businesses such as restaurants and shops were also
granted to refugees through the revolving fund. In this way, refugees’ suc-
cessful livelihoods creation enabled through the Nansen Stamp Fund pro-
vided the funding for further refugee rehabilitation.
Restrictionism and Technocratic Undertones in the 1930s
The High Commission and Nansen Office’s coordination and utilization of
refugees’ skills and funds were in many cases pivotal to successful refugee
settlement, yet economic and political climates played a large role in refugees’
ability to establish themselves—or emigrate at all. States’ increasing restric-
tionism and wariness to engage with international problems in the 1930s was
a result of both the global recession and war preparations. These had the
effect of reducing resettlement options as well as employment positions for
refugees within the Nansen Office. Partly in response to this restrictionism,
humanitarianism in the later 1930s shifted from serving identity groups to
offering aid based on need to vulnerable populations (Barnett 2011: 94). This
shift occurred alongside the professionalization of humanitarianism and
growing technocratic and top-down means of rehabilitating refugees. In con-
trast to the 1920s, refugees in the 1930s were gradually excluded from holding
decision-making or practical roles in settlement implementation. In 1938,
Michael Hansson, president of the Nansen Office, discussed replacing refugee
workers with foreign employees, stating:
There is no denying the great advantage that has been derived from the em-
ployment of refugees themselves as collaborators in the countries where the
Nansen Office has been obliged to maintain representatives .... But should it
prove necessary, or desirable, there is no reason why non-refugees should not be
employed as widely as possible, wherever of course people be found who are
willing to devote themselves to this work (Hansson 1938: 25–26).
Despite such suggestions, seemingly angled to increase non-refugee employ-
ment opportunities in an increasingly austere European environment, the
League lamented refugees’ lack of opportunity for foreign employment. In
the same speech, President Hansson stated ‘Under these changed conditions it
has proved impossible to solve the refugee problem which, to a large extent,
is an economic problem’ (Hansson 1938: 15–16). While in some senses accur-
ate, the League had also striven to remain apolitical in refugee affairs, and
continued to construe refugees as an economic problem with an economic
solution, even in the face of the discriminatory causes of German Jewish
displacement (McDonald et al. 2007).
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To combat virulent European restrictionism, the League proposed ‘solu-
tions’ to refugee settlement outside of Europe. These included a League re-
settlement scheme in Latin and South American countries with sufficient
employment opportunities, to be partially coordinated by the ILO (ILO
1928; Inman 1939). In Paraguay, for example, ‘a Colony bearing Nansen’s
name [was] established with the support of the Government and under the
supervision of a Swiss landowner’ (Hansson 1938: 9). Although few such
schemes were ever implemented, a 1939 review of suitable countries included
Brazil, Venezuela and Chile due to their vast land resources. Rural ‘pioneer-
ing’ was proffered for refugees with agricultural backgrounds to combat
population rise in already overcrowded cities:
Take a great part of the interior of Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, or some other
suitable section; move in with modern machinery and medicine; clear off the
land, drain the swamps, bridge the streams; build settlements, initiate farming,
cattle raising, and industrial activities. Let hardy refugees themselves ...be im-
portant participants in the enterprise. The remarkable accomplishments of
Henry Ford in building a modern industrial community away up in the interior
of Brazil in the Amazon jungle shows the possibility of such a dream (Inman
1939: 193).
These plans exemplify the broader intellectual and institutional shifts that
began even before World War II and greatly influenced conceptions of and
support for refugee assistance. The suggestion of a ‘made to order’ commu-
nity (ibid.) demonstrates a heightened regard for science, technology and
planning in language that portends the post-war discourse of development.
In this way, the interwar years, although distinct in many of its responses to
refugees, also incubated practices that defined the following era.
Despite their ad hoc nature, the interwar years saw the emergence of not
only the first international refugee regime, but a participatory refugee regime
with the joint aims of refugee self-reliance and host country development.
League-sponsored resettlement commissions in the 1920s and 1930s are
powerful examples of the first international bodies attempting to deal ‘sys-
tematically, and along international lines’ with displaced populations
(Macartney 1930: 5). Innovative rehabilitation strategies included material
assistance while emphasizing bottom-up methods and refugees’ ability to con-
tribute through their own skills, expertise and financial means. A variety of
factors contributed to this inclusive approach, including the League’s own
funding constraints, the common host state policy of naturalizing refugees
and an overall context of limited government welfare intervention. Refugees
were conceptualized as economic immigrants, which at different times
enabled and hindered the support they received. This fluctuating assistance
demonstrates the importance of exogenous factors such as changing global
economic contexts in achieving resettlement and refugee self-sufficiency.
Reflecting broader humanitarian shifts, the conception of refugees as workers
began to change in the 1930s as refugee settlement was cast as a humanitarian
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imperative towards vulnerable groups. This corresponded to the gradual sur-
passing of the role of refugees in their own relief by foreign employees within
increasingly planned settlement schemes. Throughout this period, the League
and the ILO gained important experience that was built upon after World
War II. The start of the war in 1939 brought a virtual halt to refugee assist-
ance, yet the post-war years saw a dramatic departure from the bottom-up,
no-charity philosophy that had once defined the main international institu-
tion’s response to refugees.
Post-War Top-Down Assistance: 1945–79
After World War II ended, and throughout the rest of the 1940s and early
1950s, the Allies concentrated efforts on repatriating or resettling the 10 to 12
million displaced persons (DPs) scattered across Europe. In 1951, UNHCR
superseded the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) and United
Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which had ori-
ginally addressed war-related European displacement. Both the successes and
the failures of the League of Nations, which dissolved in 1946, paved the way
for the UN, an international institution more structured, influential and
broader in scope than the League had ever been. Barnett (2011) cites a pa-
ternalism present within both the interwar and post-war years, which became
prominent as humanitarian organizations advanced into bureaucratized, per-
manent entities and those such as UNHCR expanded from emergency re-
sponse to the ‘development’ of both vulnerable national and refugee
populations. This shift coincided with the exclusion of refugees from employ-
ment within the very institutions mandated to serve them, as well as with the
creation of top-down assistance programmes by ‘experts’ who had little
knowledge of the regions they worked in (Betts Collection 1971–76). After
World War II, the implementation of institutional livelihoods assistance
changed, as did the discourse surrounding assistance programmes.
Strategies promoting refugee livelihoods became infused with the broader
political and intellectual thoughts of a post-war development order focused
on ‘progress’, defined by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the introduc-
tion of new populations into liberal economies. However, the goal for refugee
settlements to contribute to national development through self-sufficient refu-
gee livelihoods remained.
In interesting contrast to the requirement for refugees to contribute to their
host country’s economic progress, there was a change from the perception of
refugees as economic migrants to victims in need of protection. Building on
the trend that had emerged before the war, organizations increased humani-
tarian aid on the basis of need and protection, rather than identity and em-
ployable skills. Long (2013: 13–15) discusses this shifting conceptualization of
refugee resettlement as concretized through those refugees who did not meet
migration criteria due to illness or age, and remained in DP camps after
World War II. Indeed, by the time the so-called ‘last million’ were resettled
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in the 1950s, the resettlement of refugees as workers had become the excep-
tion rather than the norm.
Several macro-structural social and geographic factors account for this
shift in perception and practice. Western states became more involved in
citizens’ welfare and economic wellbeing after the war, as institutional
and state assistance in general increased significantly, furthering what
Barnett (2011: 99) cites as a ‘shift from state-as-night-watchman to the
state-as-caretaker’. Wider international assistance reflected heightened ‘inter-
national responsibility’ and states’ focus on a ‘common humanity’ and ‘inter-
national community’ (Barnett 2011), with the aim of advancing international
cooperation based on mutual interests. The ‘development project’ was inte-
gral to this and also significantly accounted for the construction of refugees
as beneficiaries rather than active participants in their resettlement. As refu-
gee assistance moved into Africa and other newly independent countries,
organizations such as UNHCR entered (post-)colonial landscapes of humani-
tarianism and domination that greatly influenced the implementation of live-
lihoods schemes and settlements.
10
In the process, the structure of refugee
assistance changed from the interwar years’ institutional accommodation and
reliance on refugee livelihoods to the authorization of restrictive livelihoods
measures in the name of the broader post-war goals of development.
The Incorporation of Refugees into the ‘Development Project’
Refugee livelihoods projects increased globally with the expansion of inter-
national organizations, state welfare and increased development funding
attributed to a larger pattern of intervention to promote economic stability
and peace in developing countries. By the 1960s, the first UN Development
Decade, development was viewed ‘not simply [as] an increase in productive
capacity but major transformations in [developing countries’] social and eco-
nomic structures’ (UN 1970: 5). The dominant role of the United States in
the UN, as well as the presence of American institutions such as the Ford
Foundation in the expanding area of development, meant that Western de-
velopment policy was largely shaped by American intellectual thought and
political aims, often in response to the Cold War. In this way, development as
a planned enterprise, including assistance to refugees, became a political tool
for host and donor states (Loescher and Scanlan 1986; Sachs 1992: 2). This
instrumentalization extended to assistance institutions like UNHCR, which
needed to expand in order to survive. By capitalizing on development funding
to increase refugee assistance, UNHCR grew from an institution solely
focused on relief to an agency that contributed to the UN’s aims of assisting
countries’ modernization and development (Loescher 2001). Similarly, ILO
expanded its aim and purposes to include technical and administrative re-
sponsibility (ILO 1944), and in the 1950s became increasingly involved in
development projects across the globe (Guthrie 2013).
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The transformative aim of development became more predominant in refugee
assistance during the 1960s, as evidenced through UNHCR’s African refugee
settlements, formed in response to the ‘new refugees’ resulting from wars of
decolonization. Although the aims and practices of refugee livelihoods assist-
ance mirrored those of the interwar years, settlement and project implementa-
tion differed drastically. Main assistance practices, such as agricultural
production and vocational training in settlements, continued, yet occurred
with little emphasis on accommodating or promoting the existing livelihoods
strategies of refugees. The ultimate aim of settlements was to improve host
country economies as part of the larger ‘project’ of development, which led
to administrative structures that excluded refugees. ‘Self-sufficient’ refugee
settlements were to be fostered through viable refugee livelihoods—mainly
the strictly regulated cultivation of cash crops for national exportation. This
was primarily achieved through block, monoculture farming, which created
both social and practical problems (ICVA 1969: 1; Betts Collection 1971–76;
RPG 1985). Host country policies contributed to refugees’ inability to govern
their own livelihoods, as naturalization and the right to work were often re-
stricted (Stein 1990: 2). Bitter about what they perceived as unequal burden-
sharing by donor states, host countries also promoted policies of encampment
due to the flow of aid that such settlements received, as well as the often
accurate fear that refugees posed a security risk through spillover conflicts
and struggles over resources with host populations (RPG 1985).
Zonal Development, Foreign ‘Experts’ and the Exclusion of Refugees
Initially, UNHCR programmes targeted refugee self-reliance by offering land,
tools and seeds—a strategy known as basic minimal assistance. Programmes
were initially hands-off and in this way similar to those implemented by the
League. However, this assistance rarely led to economic self-sufficiency (Stein
1990: 13; Loescher 2001: 122), and the programmes that replaced it became
drastically more regulated. In the 1960s, UNHCR proponents of greater as-
sistance such as the UN High Commissioner Felix Schnyder, advocated for a
comprehensive development approach that included local host communities
and contributed to host country economies. Known as ‘zonal development’,
this was in essence a repackaging of livelihoods programmes from the inter-
war years. Discussing rehabilitation projects, one report states:
[T]he objective is not merely to offer refugees the possibility of earning their
daily bread. These projects must aim further and be integrated into national
development programmes. The Governments make available to the refugees the
land, agricultural tools, seed and fertilisers (Betts Collection 1967c: Box 15,
General Work, Afr/Ref/Conf./No. 17:5).
Zonal development targeted both refugee and host populations, and included
the building of roads, schools and health facilities. The ambit of refugee
assistance and self-sufficiency therefore continued to include infrastructure
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development for entire areas hosting refugee settlements, now modelled partly
on the World Bank’s integrated rural development settlements (Loescher
2001: 122).
By the late 1960s in East Africa, foreign workers were almost solely dir-
ecting and implementing refugee rehabilitation, in stark contrast to the
former role of refugees and host country nationals in these matters.
Africans were not employed within UNHCR in the 1960s and the agency’s
organizational partners had little prior experience in Africa (Loescher 2001:
119). A variety of social and economic factors account for this institutional
structure. Just as the recession in the 1930s led to the engagement of more
foreign non-refugee employees in refugee relief, the 1960 recession affected
the refugee regime similarly. Indeed, a report from the 1967 Conference on
the Legal, Economic and Social Aspects of African Refugee Problems con-
vened in Addis Ababa (the Addis Ababa Conference) stated ‘every State is
anxious to safeguard its employment market .. .. As a result, states have been
known to employ European expatriate staff on contract basis, rather than
African refugees’ (Betts Collection 1967b: Box no. 15, General Work: 12).
Eriksson et al. (1981: 29) echoed this, also noting that African governments
preferred to employ foreign experts instead of refugees, as their salaries were
frequently paid through development assistance programmes.
The dearth of refugees and local experts involved in settlement structures
drastically impacted the mandated livelihoods practices employed, and led to
a variety of social and practical problems (RPG 1985: 99). Due to ignorance
and a lack of site planning, plots were often too small for more than sub-
sistence farming and officials disregarded both important preliminary soil
quality surveys and necessary planting times (Betts Collection 1971–76).
Innovative and ultimately destructive technologies such as bulldozers
impeded successful crop production through scraping away rich topsoil, lead-
ing only cassava to grow (Feldman 1971: 2). Despite multiple reports of ‘land
exhaustion’ (IORD 1971: 11) in various settlements, a main focus remained
on cultivating cash crops such as tobacco and improving means of agricul-
tural production. A 1971 settlement assessment states:
The more general conclusion is that the potential of the agricultural infrastruc-
ture has not been effectively utilised. This is mainly because of a lack of experi-
ence of those controlling them, and the inadequate information provided ....In
retrospect, it does appear that a large amount of the settlements’ infrastructure
and therefore the ‘cost’ of settling the refugees, can be primarily explained in
terms of the capital support needed to maintain project staff. Their limited
technical expertise, and their limited access to technical information available
locally has meant that there have been few long term benefits from such expend-
itures (Feldman 1971: 5, emphasis added).
This top-down authority and lack of expertise were accompanied by an
absence of communication with refugees and locals and the virtual suppres-
sion of refugee agency from decision-making and implementation roles.
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Refugees were not employees or delegates of organizations such as UNHCR
but instead mere ‘beneficiaries’. Settlements became sites for community and
rural development projects led by a myriad of international organizations
including ILO, UNDP and members of the International Council of
Voluntary Organisations (ICVA), which often worked in tandem to achieve
their aims. However, a 1967 overview of the work of 20 organizations com-
prising the ICVA demonstrated little focus on livelihoods activities, but in-
stead on the administration of food and medicine and the promotion of basic
education (Betts Collection 1967a: Box 15, General Work, Afr/Ref/Conf.
1967/No. 13). Few microfinance programmes were implemented; the funding
of those that were came from international donors through aid agencies in-
stead of from refugees themselves (IORD 1971). The few livelihood-focused
projects invested in cash crops as the main means to self-sufficiency, demon-
strating institutions’ and host states’ main focus of integrating refugees into
national economies (Betts Collection 1967a: Box 15, General Work, Afr/Ref/
Conf. 1967/No. 13). Alternative settlement livelihoods schemes such as co-
operative shops were largely run by camp staff and thus could not rightfully
be seen as refugee enterprises (Morsink 1971: 5).
An authoritarian settlement approach was widespread by 1970, when a
total of 57 countries implemented projects through the UNHCR Material
Assistance Programme, many focused on self-reliance and jointly led with
ILO and UNDP (UNHCR 1970). The administration of the Rutamba
Settlement in Tanzania, established in 1965, is representative of top-
down post-war refugee livelihoods assistance. Supported by UNHCR and
the Lutheran World Federation, in 1967, the settlement held 8,000 refugees
struggling to become self-sufficient (ICVA 1967). Although refugee settle-
ment leaders were elected, they wielded no true power. Of Rutamba,
Trappe writes:
There is no participation by refugees in the management of the Settlement. The
sixty-five ‘leaders’ play only a rather passive role in the organisation ... . The
Settlement Commandant and his staff ...adopt the system of pure direction
from above (Trappe 1971: 2).
High Commissioner Khan’s calls in the 1960s and 1970s to increase the
availability of skilled training and positions for refugees in both African
and non-African countries was largely unsuccessful. Instead, vocational
programmes and settlement classes, ostensibly to teach skills to enable self-
reliance, ultimately contributed to perpetuating power disparities be-
tween refugees and settlement staff. Foreign-led ‘Settlement Community
Development Programmes’ were instituted to teach and train refugees accord-
ing to designated methods. At the Rutamba Settlement, these programmes
included:
[O]fficial urging ...to engage in certain types of agriculture and in block farm-
ing, or to introduce certain kinds of crops; ‘softer’ methods used include
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‘classes’ and ‘clubs’ for women and youth and to a lesser extent demonstrations,
for instance, of food preparation (Trappe 1971: 7).
Such directive programmes corresponded to stringent regulations surrounding
refugees’ own livelihood practices. Some of these rules were host country
policies, such as the prohibition of refugee marketing organizations in
Tanzania. This resulted in a dependency on outside co-operative societies
to buy their crops and an attendant lack of refugee ownership over their
source of income; as one settlement impact assessor remarked, ‘As the refugee
farmers were not able to join these societies so they were unable to exert any
pressure on the societies to provide them with an adequate service’ (Morsink
1971: 5). Many other harmful policies, however, came from within the settle-
ments themselves (RPG 1985). Overwhelmingly negative reports of East
African refugee settlements in Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania between
1971 and 1976 cite a highly authoritarian administration that restricted refu-
gees’ livelihoods strategies and the overall effectiveness of rural development
plans (Betts Collection 1971–76). Refugees were not only discouraged, but
actively punished for having any livelihood other than an institutionally
mandated one—usually farming. Refugees at Rutamba were originally in-
tended to grow cashew nuts as the main cash crop, but this expanded to
others in an effort to raise refugees above the subsistence level. However:
Most [refugee] farmers questioned said they were prevented by the settlement
authorities from extending their fishing activities. The main rationale behind
discouraging fishing is the desire to maximise the cultivated area of the settle-
ment. Fishing ...is tolerated only if it does not interfere with the agricultural
projects. The use of coercion is considered normal, and refugees are put into
prison if they fail to provide expected labour requirements for projects such as the
establishment this year of 400 acres of block farms to grow more rice, beans
and cassava (Trappe 1971: 10, emphasis added).
Due in part to harsh prohibitions and regulations, a common strategy of
refugees included leaving settlements to find work (Betts 1969; UNHCR
1970). A 1970 ICVA report cites a growing ‘exodus of refugees from the
settlements’, noting with concern reasons such as interior politics, poor agri-
cultural conditions and high taxation (ICVA 1970: 2). Many of the settle-
ments that eventually became self-sufficient experienced a dramatic decline in
population before becoming stable (RPG 1985; Stein 1990). However, in
contrast to the interwar years, refugees were no longer settled in urban or
rural areas best suited to their background and skills, but in cases were for-
cibly removed from the ‘spontaneous’ settlements they had created and in-
stead brought to organized, planned settlements.
Out of the 117 settlements established in Africa, UNHCR declared only 30
of these self-sufficient between 1966 and 1982 (Stein 1990: 3). Of these, 21
received renewed aid in this period, and eight enough aid to make their true
self-sufficiency debatable (RPG 1985: 80; Stein 1990: 3). However, despite the
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failings of many settlements and documented negative effects of authoritarian
administration, the main recommendations of the Arusha Conference, con-
vened in 1979 to address the refugee ‘problem’ in Africa, were for agricultural
development programmes and vocational training according to the needs of
the host government (Regional Refugee Instruments & Related 1979: paras
1b, 3c). The ‘effective involvement of refugees in the integration and devel-
opment process’ (ibid.: para. 3d) was recommended, yet it was the ‘officials
administering refugee affairs’ that were encouraged to develop best practices
for refugee self-reliance (ibid.: para. 4). These recommendations, therefore,
were simply reiterations of practices already in place and did not acknow-
ledge the role that those ‘officials’ played in the emerging status quo of
settlement dependency. They furthermore served as a basis for the livelihoods
programmes encompassed within RAD and later initiatives. It is in this top-
down way, despite the increased emphasis on post-development and the
participatory chassis, that refugee livelihoods continued to be addressed in
programmes and settlements led by main institutions such as UNHCR, ILO
and UNDP throughout the 1980s—and up to today.
Discussion: From Bottom-Up to Top-Down to Today
My findings demonstrate that refugee livelihoods assistance between 1919 and
1979 was bottom-up and largely ad hoc during the interwar years yet became
part of top-down, technocratic development efforts after World War II.
Refugee livelihoods played a central role in refugee assistance in the decades
prior, exemplified through the employment of refugees in the High
Commission for Refugees and Nansen Office, refugee funding of the
Nansen Stamp Fund, ILO’s employment-matching scheme and efforts to
place refugees in urban or rural areas based on past livelihoods. After
World War II, refugee livelihoods, and thus the role of refugees themselves,
became ancillary, with the predominant focus on host country development.
Refugees were forced onto agricultural settlements that implemented block
farming for cash crops, and were incarcerated if found engaging in alternative
livelihoods. In this way, the international refugee regime changed from inclu-
sive towards refugees to largely exclusive. While the interwar era not only
invited but indeed necessitated the role of refugees as active participants in
their own livelihoods creation, in both entrepreneurial and organizational
capacities, the period after only passively involved refugees. Concomitant
with this was the reconceptualization of refugees from capable workers to
members of a vulnerable population. In both eras, however, there were multi-
pronged efforts to rehabilitate refugees while simultaneously boosting host
countries’ infrastructure and economic development. The aims of refugee self-
reliance and national development have therefore remained consistent
throughout the history of the international refugee regime, although the
means have changed.
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This article has highlighted similarities and differences in refugee liveli-
hoods assistance throughout a history that is commonly seen as beginning
35 years instead of nearly a century ago. When viewed in conjunction with
contemporary assistance practices, these findings invite reflection on the rele-
vance of history to current discussions on ‘innovation’, another concept that
has recently gained traction in the humanitarian arena and is often con-
sidered a blindly used buzzword (Ramalingam 2013). Although innovation
by way of adaptation to new situations and emerging technologies is present
within refugee assistance, the purview of this history suggests that innovation
in the case of refugee livelihoods assistance largely does not refer to new
creations. Instead, this archival research reveals that contemporary practices
have been employed, often successfully, since the 1920s. It is instead their
structure and implementation that have changed. The evolution of terms,
such as the contemporaneous ‘microfinance’ instead of ‘revolving funds’,
demonstrates more of a repackaging than the truly novel innovation of
these practices. An alternative definition of innovation as old methods
enacted in a new way or context may instead be most useful in efforts to
improve current livelihoods assistance. However, in order for this to be sub-
stantiated, awareness of what has or has not already occurred in the past and
with which results is necessary.
Zonal development is a fitting example of the reincarnation of past refugee
aid and development programmes that have occurred throughout the history
of the international refugee regime. Sometimes, these have been obscured by
discursive changes, such as from the 1920s ‘rehabilitation’ to the 1960s ‘ani-
mation’ of refugees, yet strategies virtually identical to zonal development
appeared under other names in the 1980s and more recent decades.
However, zonal development has been largely forgotten and these later pro-
grammes remain largely ascribed to the aforementioned 1979 Arusha
Conference. Examining where ‘innovative’ solutions are needed in refugee
assistance with knowledge of this history is important, for, in cases, the
failed rural settlements of the 1960s and 1970s have become the refugee
camps of today, with many persisting practical challenges. Ongoing problems
include inadequate planning for refugee camps, such as lack of soil testing,
and a disregard for refugees’ own methods of livelihoods creation. Kaiser’s
(2006) examination of long-term Sudanese refugees in Uganda, for example,
discusses problems of soil quality and inadequate settlement plot size—
precisely the same issues as reported by Betts on the same population in
1960s Uganda (Betts 1969). In 2010, UNHCR cited ‘lack of early planning’
as a major issue in responding to displacement (2010: 7), echoing discussions
and disappointing results from previous decades.
Reflecting on older African settlements, a 1985 Refugee Policy Group
report stated ‘Refugee participation may be the concept with the worst
ratio of rhetoric to reality in the entire refugee assistance system’ (RPG
1985: 104). The relevance of this statement to livelihoods assistance today
makes it important to question how innovation within the sector addresses
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the abiding lack of affected community participation. Despite a contempor-
ary emphasis on participatory approaches within refugee assistance, innov-
ation has largely meant looking outside of affected communities for problem-
solving as well as focusing on product creation and ‘new’ initiatives, instead
of evaluating and adjusting the structures through which assistance is pro-
vided (Betts and Bloom 2013). Although focused on fostering refugee self-
reliance, collaborative efforts such as the Transitional Solutions Initiative, led
by UNHCR, UNDP and the World Bank, maintain the status quo of pro-
viding products and programmes for and not truly with refugees (UNDP–
UNHCR 2013). The UNHCR Innovation Initiative, launched in 2012, pro-
motes livelihoods and self-reliance (under the theme of ‘Work’), yet its core
partnerships lie with the private sector, academia and agency staff (UNHCR
2013). Similarly, UNHCR’s 2014–2018 Global Strategy for Livelihoods aims
to promote affected communities’ rights of work and development through
participation, yet nowhere states refugees or other displaced people as poten-
tial partners in these endeavours (UNHCR 2014). In this way, despite a
discourse of refugee capability in UNHCR’s Livelihoods and Self-Reliance
Unit, programme implementation is reminiscent of post-war administration
in that it is still driven by actors other than refugees themselves. The current
rhetoric of refugee agency is important, but has yet to be actualized within
the institutional implementation of assistance, and participatory and inclusive
approaches remain underemployed (Betts and Bloom 2013: 3).
Extant gaps in historical knowledge and institutional memory result in an
inability to identify true innovations or best practices in refugee livelihoods
assistance. Similarly, these gaps occlude knowledge of protracted challenges
in camp administration and programme implementation where change would
be most beneficial. More comprehensive knowledge of historical refugee as-
sistance diminishes the critiqued ahistoricity of Refugee Studies and also
offers opportunities for the critical examination of discourse and practice in
refugee aid and development. Analysing the longer history of refugee liveli-
hoods assistance in particular offers insight into the administration design
that better enabled successful refugee self-reliance in the past, and the con-
struction of refugees that accompanied it; the interwar years specifically pre-
sent pathways to learn from where ‘beneficiary’ participation and national
economic development intersected with mutual benefit to both refugees and
host states. The long-standing practical and social issues highlighted here
continue to negatively affect refugee assistance and point towards areas in
need of different approaches. Most significant is a change from the bottom-
up to top-down administration and implementation of agricultural settlements,
vocational training, and microfinance and income-generating projects that
persist today. These findings warrant not only more comprehensive historical
research, but a closer examination of current efforts that may be termed
‘innovative’, for this research suggests that the structure of livelihoods assist-
ance needs more attention than what is being provided—findings relevant
for broader consideration in both policy and practice. Indeed, focusing on
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refugee livelihoods with this understanding—a potential that further historical
examination provides—may be one of the most innovative forms of assist-
ance offered yet.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Eleanor Bath, William Allen and two anonymous
reviewers for their helpful thoughts and comments on this piece. I am also
grateful to the entire Humanitarian Innovation Project team for their ongoing
support for this project, as well as initial funding for archival research.
1. The initial research for this project was undertaken as assistance work for the
Humanitarian Innovation Project from August - September 2013.
2. It is, however, erroneous to consider Refugee Studies entirely ahistorical. In add-
ition to later literature, academic works published in the first half of the twentieth
century (Mears 1929; Simpson 1939; Vernant 1953; Holborn 1956) provide import-
ant information regarding dominant perceptions of refugees and offer detailed and
immediate accounts of the international responses they elicited.
3. The budget covered 79 countries and increased from 120 to 200 million (UNHCR
2012: 14).
4. The Arusha Conference brought to the fore many of the long-standing issues of
refugee settlement, including the unequal burden-sharing of African countries and
the struggle for integrated, self-reliant refugee settlements in host countries.
5. The ICARA Process also comprised the 1980 International Conference on
Refugees in The Sudan, the 1981 and 1984 ICARA Conferences and the resulting
strategy of ‘Refugee Aid and Development’ (RAD) (Stein 1997; Betts 2004).
6. Reincarnations of RAD appear in more recent programmes, including ‘Targeted
Development Assistance’ within Convention Plus, a series of broader, more ambi-
tious UNHCR Initiatives from 2002 to 2006 aiming to create international agree-
ments on burden-sharing (Betts 2004), and the ‘Transitional Solutions’ Initiative,
developed in 2010, which seeks to bring ‘displacement’ onto the development
agenda through area-based interventions (UNHCR 2010).
7. The historical research in existence on, for example, past efforts aimed at integra-
tion (Crisp 2004), repatriation (Stein 1981; Crisp 1984; Rogge 1985; Crisp 1986;
Stein et al. 1991; Cuny and Stein 1992; Chimni 2004), and international confer-
ences and initiatives (Gorman 1985, 1993, 1994; Betts and Durieux 2007; Betts
2008, 2009) provide opportunities to learn more about past refugee livelihoods
assistance.
8. I identified relevant primary literature in a series of iterative waves from July to
September 2013 using Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), Social Science
Research Network, Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts (ASSIA),
Labordoc and the Campbell Library, supplemented by Google Scholar searches.
Initially retrieved studies prompted further searches of bibliographies, which in
turn generated more relevant literature. I initially screened each piece of literature
on keywords, title and, if available, an abstract. Relevant studies were then ob-
tained, charted, tagged with keywords and stored in an electronic database. Full
search terms were: Refugee AND Business development, Economic activities,
Economic capacities, Enterprise/enterprise development, Entrepreneurs,
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Employment-generating projects, Employment promotion/creation, Income-gener-
ation/-generating activities, Livelihoods, Rehabilitation, Self-employment, Self-
Reliance, Self-sufficiency.
9. For the protection concerns this created, see Long, K. (2013) ‘When Refugees
Stopped Being Migrants: Movement, Labour and Humanitarian Protection’.
Migration Studies 1(1): 4–26.
10. It is beyond the scope of this article to identify direct corollaries between colonial
and post-colonial livelihoods assistance and development structures, yet strong
critical analyses discussing the effects of colonialism on humanitarianism
exist (see Barnett and Weiss 2008; Chimni 2009) and further research specifically
focused on refugee livelihoods assistance is a worthwhile and needed endeavour.
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