Hilde Refstie | Norwegian University of Science and Technology (original) (raw)
Papers by Hilde Refstie
Planning Theory & Practice
Participation is promoted as the main engine for transformation in urban planning and slum upgrad... more Participation is promoted as the main engine for transformation in urban planning and slum upgrading in Malawi, despite the fact that most projects never get beyond the planning stage. Serious participation fatigue has been identified in many areas, but little is done to change the dominant script. This article comes out of an action research project with groups of urban poor and their organizations in Malawi. It analyses existing spaces in which participatory planning and slum upgrading take place, and reflects on what combinations of participatory spaces that might serve to enable change. The authors define political agency and locate potential transformation in agonistic spaces that open up for rupture and for people’s interest to be accepted as voice rather than noise. At the same time, participants in urban Malawi often wish to be included into existing frameworks rather than challenging them. The article therefore explores a third way between a programme of insurgent radical a...
The year 2008 marked a historical turning point as, for the first time, more than half the world&... more The year 2008 marked a historical turning point as, for the first time, more than half the world's total population now lives in urbanized landscapes. In an effort to address this gap in knowledge and policy response, Cities Alliance and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) conducted a scoping study in 2010 on urban displacement with the objective of identifying the challenges in responding to forced displacement to urban areas. This study focused on refugees and internally displaced persons living in, or who have returned or relocated to, urban environments in developing countries as a result of or after conflict-induced humanitarian crises. Key findings of the study include: 1) establishment of residence in urban areas by significant numbers of displaced people from a different ethnic or sectarian group is potentially destabilising if not mitigated properly; 2) many of the poorly built urban environments in which most urban refugees/ IDPs live are in areas tha...
This dissertation investigates the discourse on Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Uganda and... more This dissertation investigates the discourse on Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Uganda and how IDPs in urban areas fit in to the discourse on both the theoretical and practical level. The d ...
The largest wave of displacement in Uganda occurred in 1995-96, when the government forced civili... more The largest wave of displacement in Uganda occurred in 1995-96, when the government forced civilians in northern Uganda into so-called 'protected villages' using mortars and helicopter gunships in the process. The 'protected villages' were later turned into IDP camps 1 which received little assistance from the government. The humanitarian community in Uganda limited its food distribution to IDPs registered and residing within the camps.
Critical scholars sometimes accuse action researchers of not being radical enough in their approa... more Critical scholars sometimes accuse action researchers of not being radical enough in their approach, while action researchers often see the work of critical scholars as elitist and not grounded in people’s everyday experiences. This article draws on an action research project with residents in urban informal settlements in Malawi and their partner organizations in the period 2013-2017 to discuss how research can negotiate and achieve its multiple imperatives of being critical and rooted, explanatory and actionable. It shows how the action research approach with its collaborative elements helped the research project avoid what Louis McNay (2014:4) calls “social weightlessness” in political theorizing – “an abstract way of thinking that is so far removed from the actual practices and dynamics of everyday life that, ultimately, its own analytical relevance and normative validity are thrown into question”. The article reflects on the possibilities and limitations of the integrated appro...
Action Research, 2019
Most action research processes aim to improve living conditions, assist in the development of mor... more Most action research processes aim to improve living conditions, assist in the development of more effective policies or create spaces for mobilization. The outputs of such research tend to be well documented, but less attention has been given to how spaces for action research are formed. This article uses a narrative autobiographical approach to analyse the initial phase of a collaborative action research process with informal settlement groups and their support organizations in Malawi. It discusses how the research topic emerged, the process of identifying entry points, and how negotiations among participants, partners, researchers and institutions at different levels co-produced the action research space. The article concludes that interrogating the multiple beginnings of an action research project can make visible situated knowledges and power relations that influence a research process. A challenge is how to make this interrogation a collaborative exercise that captures the mul...
Fennia - International Journal of Geography, 2020
This collective editorial on the neoliberal university follows eight days of strike action at six... more This collective editorial on the neoliberal university follows eight days of strike action at sixty UK universities called by the University and College Union (UCU) in two separate legal disputes, one on pensions and one on pay and working conditions. Anticipating the recent labor strike after previous industrial disputes in 2018 at UK universities, the work included here emanates from two dialogues at the Nordic Geographers Meeting (NGM) in summer 2019, a public meeting called Protest Pub and a conference session on the neoliberal subject and the neoliberal academy. After an opening statement by the editors, this collective endeavor begins with the urgent collaborative action of graduate students and early-career academics and is followed by reflections on life in the neoliberal academy from those involved in the dialogues at the NGM 2019 in Trondheim. Additionally, the editorial introduces the content of the present issue.
Planning Theory & Practice, 2019
This article discusses how global ideas on co-production and citizenship built from below are tra... more This article discusses how global ideas on co-production and citizenship built from below are translated into community mobilization and participatory planning practices in urban Malawi. It shows how limited national and local resources, disconnections from national and urban policies of redistribution, and a local politics shaped by both clientelism and democratic reforms create a glass ceiling for what global models of community mobilization and participation are able to achieve. It calls for a more systematic and empirically diverse research agenda to better understand how participatory discourses and practices embedded in grassroots organizing are transferred and mediated in place.
Fennia - International Journal of Geography
In this lecture, I discuss the role of academia in addressing “fast policymaking” on sustainabili... more In this lecture, I discuss the role of academia in addressing “fast policymaking” on sustainability. I suggest that the co-productive turn, whereby universities are increasingly expected to engage with a diverse set of actors, including citizens, can provide checks and balances to top-heavy bureaucracy, political elites, and market power in sustainability processes. However, if research relevance continues to be defined in neoliberal terms as meeting the needs of the economy and industry, this potential will not be realized. Drawing inspiration from the “slow research movement”, the call for more reflexive co-production in sustainability science, decolonial scholarship, and alternative debates on research impact, I propose a critical reconfiguration of research relevance that would respond better to the multiple imperatives of research to be critical, rooted, explanatory and actionable. However, this reconfiguration would be contingent on active scholarly engagement with the politic...
The reluctance of some humanitarian actors to address the needs of IDPs inconveniently located in... more The reluctance of some humanitarian actors to address the needs of IDPs inconveniently located in urban areas – in contrast to those in camps – belies their commitment to a rights-based approach to assistance and protection.
Journal of Refugee Studies, 2012
Disasters, 2012
Rapid urbanisation is a key characteristic of the modern world, interacting with and reinforcing ... more Rapid urbanisation is a key characteristic of the modern world, interacting with and reinforcing other global mega trends, including armed conflict, climate change, crime, environmental degradation, financial and economic instability, food shortages, underemployment, volatile commodity prices, and weak governance. Displaced people also are affected by and engaged in the process of urbanisation. Increasingly, refugees, returnees, and internally displaced persons (IDPs) are to be found not in camps or among host communities in rural areas, but in the towns and cities of developing and middle-income countries. The arrival and long-term settlement of displaced populations in urban areas needs to be better anticipated, understood, and planned for, with a particular emphasis on the establishment of new partnerships. Humanitarian actors can no longer liaise only with national governments; they must also develop urgently closer working relationships with mayors and municipal authorities, service providers, urban police forces, and, most importantly, the representatives of both displaced and resident communities. This requires linking up with those development actors that have established such partnerships already.
Planning Theory & Practice
Participation is promoted as the main engine for transformation in urban planning and slum upgrad... more Participation is promoted as the main engine for transformation in urban planning and slum upgrading in Malawi, despite the fact that most projects never get beyond the planning stage. Serious participation fatigue has been identified in many areas, but little is done to change the dominant script. This article comes out of an action research project with groups of urban poor and their organizations in Malawi. It analyses existing spaces in which participatory planning and slum upgrading take place, and reflects on what combinations of participatory spaces that might serve to enable change. The authors define political agency and locate potential transformation in agonistic spaces that open up for rupture and for people’s interest to be accepted as voice rather than noise. At the same time, participants in urban Malawi often wish to be included into existing frameworks rather than challenging them. The article therefore explores a third way between a programme of insurgent radical a...
The year 2008 marked a historical turning point as, for the first time, more than half the world&... more The year 2008 marked a historical turning point as, for the first time, more than half the world's total population now lives in urbanized landscapes. In an effort to address this gap in knowledge and policy response, Cities Alliance and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) conducted a scoping study in 2010 on urban displacement with the objective of identifying the challenges in responding to forced displacement to urban areas. This study focused on refugees and internally displaced persons living in, or who have returned or relocated to, urban environments in developing countries as a result of or after conflict-induced humanitarian crises. Key findings of the study include: 1) establishment of residence in urban areas by significant numbers of displaced people from a different ethnic or sectarian group is potentially destabilising if not mitigated properly; 2) many of the poorly built urban environments in which most urban refugees/ IDPs live are in areas tha...
This dissertation investigates the discourse on Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Uganda and... more This dissertation investigates the discourse on Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Uganda and how IDPs in urban areas fit in to the discourse on both the theoretical and practical level. The d ...
The largest wave of displacement in Uganda occurred in 1995-96, when the government forced civili... more The largest wave of displacement in Uganda occurred in 1995-96, when the government forced civilians in northern Uganda into so-called 'protected villages' using mortars and helicopter gunships in the process. The 'protected villages' were later turned into IDP camps 1 which received little assistance from the government. The humanitarian community in Uganda limited its food distribution to IDPs registered and residing within the camps.
Critical scholars sometimes accuse action researchers of not being radical enough in their approa... more Critical scholars sometimes accuse action researchers of not being radical enough in their approach, while action researchers often see the work of critical scholars as elitist and not grounded in people’s everyday experiences. This article draws on an action research project with residents in urban informal settlements in Malawi and their partner organizations in the period 2013-2017 to discuss how research can negotiate and achieve its multiple imperatives of being critical and rooted, explanatory and actionable. It shows how the action research approach with its collaborative elements helped the research project avoid what Louis McNay (2014:4) calls “social weightlessness” in political theorizing – “an abstract way of thinking that is so far removed from the actual practices and dynamics of everyday life that, ultimately, its own analytical relevance and normative validity are thrown into question”. The article reflects on the possibilities and limitations of the integrated appro...
Action Research, 2019
Most action research processes aim to improve living conditions, assist in the development of mor... more Most action research processes aim to improve living conditions, assist in the development of more effective policies or create spaces for mobilization. The outputs of such research tend to be well documented, but less attention has been given to how spaces for action research are formed. This article uses a narrative autobiographical approach to analyse the initial phase of a collaborative action research process with informal settlement groups and their support organizations in Malawi. It discusses how the research topic emerged, the process of identifying entry points, and how negotiations among participants, partners, researchers and institutions at different levels co-produced the action research space. The article concludes that interrogating the multiple beginnings of an action research project can make visible situated knowledges and power relations that influence a research process. A challenge is how to make this interrogation a collaborative exercise that captures the mul...
Fennia - International Journal of Geography, 2020
This collective editorial on the neoliberal university follows eight days of strike action at six... more This collective editorial on the neoliberal university follows eight days of strike action at sixty UK universities called by the University and College Union (UCU) in two separate legal disputes, one on pensions and one on pay and working conditions. Anticipating the recent labor strike after previous industrial disputes in 2018 at UK universities, the work included here emanates from two dialogues at the Nordic Geographers Meeting (NGM) in summer 2019, a public meeting called Protest Pub and a conference session on the neoliberal subject and the neoliberal academy. After an opening statement by the editors, this collective endeavor begins with the urgent collaborative action of graduate students and early-career academics and is followed by reflections on life in the neoliberal academy from those involved in the dialogues at the NGM 2019 in Trondheim. Additionally, the editorial introduces the content of the present issue.
Planning Theory & Practice, 2019
This article discusses how global ideas on co-production and citizenship built from below are tra... more This article discusses how global ideas on co-production and citizenship built from below are translated into community mobilization and participatory planning practices in urban Malawi. It shows how limited national and local resources, disconnections from national and urban policies of redistribution, and a local politics shaped by both clientelism and democratic reforms create a glass ceiling for what global models of community mobilization and participation are able to achieve. It calls for a more systematic and empirically diverse research agenda to better understand how participatory discourses and practices embedded in grassroots organizing are transferred and mediated in place.
Fennia - International Journal of Geography
In this lecture, I discuss the role of academia in addressing “fast policymaking” on sustainabili... more In this lecture, I discuss the role of academia in addressing “fast policymaking” on sustainability. I suggest that the co-productive turn, whereby universities are increasingly expected to engage with a diverse set of actors, including citizens, can provide checks and balances to top-heavy bureaucracy, political elites, and market power in sustainability processes. However, if research relevance continues to be defined in neoliberal terms as meeting the needs of the economy and industry, this potential will not be realized. Drawing inspiration from the “slow research movement”, the call for more reflexive co-production in sustainability science, decolonial scholarship, and alternative debates on research impact, I propose a critical reconfiguration of research relevance that would respond better to the multiple imperatives of research to be critical, rooted, explanatory and actionable. However, this reconfiguration would be contingent on active scholarly engagement with the politic...
The reluctance of some humanitarian actors to address the needs of IDPs inconveniently located in... more The reluctance of some humanitarian actors to address the needs of IDPs inconveniently located in urban areas – in contrast to those in camps – belies their commitment to a rights-based approach to assistance and protection.
Journal of Refugee Studies, 2012
Disasters, 2012
Rapid urbanisation is a key characteristic of the modern world, interacting with and reinforcing ... more Rapid urbanisation is a key characteristic of the modern world, interacting with and reinforcing other global mega trends, including armed conflict, climate change, crime, environmental degradation, financial and economic instability, food shortages, underemployment, volatile commodity prices, and weak governance. Displaced people also are affected by and engaged in the process of urbanisation. Increasingly, refugees, returnees, and internally displaced persons (IDPs) are to be found not in camps or among host communities in rural areas, but in the towns and cities of developing and middle-income countries. The arrival and long-term settlement of displaced populations in urban areas needs to be better anticipated, understood, and planned for, with a particular emphasis on the establishment of new partnerships. Humanitarian actors can no longer liaise only with national governments; they must also develop urgently closer working relationships with mayors and municipal authorities, service providers, urban police forces, and, most importantly, the representatives of both displaced and resident communities. This requires linking up with those development actors that have established such partnerships already.