From global prescription to local treatment: The international refugee regime in Tanzania and Uganda

This dissertation examines the impact of the international refugee regime in Africa and seeks to explain the varying degree to which the norms of this regime are actually implemented. It does so by emphasising the link between the relative indeterminacy of international guidelines and the resulting autonomy of local inter-organisational networks to define and institutionalise practice on the ground. More specifically, it argues that the nature of 'humanitarian governance' and the ambiguity inherent in the legal and bureaucratic refugee rights regime together explain the relationship between regime practice and regime objectives.; The combination of broad goals and often problematic implementation gives rise to a redefinition of compliance benchmarks, or notions of what constitutes successful norm implementation. Implementation practices and potentially unstable emergent compliance benchmarks create a new, local, refugee regime. Over time, often highly unstable inter-organisational networks charged with coordinating and implementing refugee policy in Africa establish their own decision-making procedures and modes of governance. These proximate manifestations of the global refugee regime define both purpose and results, that is to say performance and its interpretation. Thus, to a significant extent, the ground rules of the international refugee regime emerge 'from below.'; The dissertation explains how such local regime configurations emerge and why they matter. The feedback loop linking these local configurations and the global regime is analysed in the context of the current crisis confronting the regime and recent reform efforts. The dissertation provides an alternative to theoretical approaches that see regimes either as sites of 'learning' or as instances solely of interest-based bargaining among states. Inter-organisational networks are both consequential and often unstable. Notions of 'on the ground' inter-organisational complexity and turbulence are identified as more appropriate tools with which to analyse new 'internationalised' policy spaces.; The findings are based on case studies of protracted refugee situations in Tanzania and Uganda and two policy sectors within the refugee regime-status determination and security. It combines the tools of formal network analysis with empirical evidence gleaned from fourteen months of field research in both countries and access to primary documentation - notably, the historical archives of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.