Peer-reviewed Articles by Katharina Lenner
Arab Studies Journal, 2024
This article explores the way competing transnational imaginaries of conservation and protection ... more This article explores the way competing transnational imaginaries of conservation and protection of nature have shaped the history of institutionalised conservation efforts in Jordan, highlighting the intersection between international conservation agencies, international funding bodies and national organizations and elites, and contrasts this with contemporary perspectives of communities living around the countries’ protected areas (particularly Dana, Azraq and Wadi Rum). In doing so, it reinforces calls for conceptualising the coloniality of conservation as heterogeneous and specific.
The article shows that that while early British proposals for protection through multi-purpose national parks would have led to a relatively inclusive form of conservation, they did not materialise on the ground. What instead became dominant during the subsequent phase of American hegemony in Jordan was a fortress conservation model that excluded local populations from using as well as managing the resources of protected areas. This legacy, it argues, cast a long shadow into the 1990s’ turn towards “integrated conservation and development” as a new model. The success of this model, and the way it shaped organizational dynamics of the RSCN – the agency mandated with protected area management in Jordan - has hindered contemporary efforts to transition to community-led forms of conservation. This points to a need for appreciating deeply engrained institutional dynamics, as well as continued experiences of dispossession by local residents as major factors preventing the establishment of less exclusive forms of conservation.
Development and Change, 2024
This article explores the significance of initiatives to formalize the labour market participatio... more This article explores the significance of initiatives to formalize the labour market participation of refugees. Many practitioners believe that formalization is a panacea for improving the lives of marginalized workers, including refugees. This article argues, however, that in practice it easily becomes an indicator-oriented exercise, where readily quantifiable targets are prioritized over substantive improvements. To this end, the article analyses the trajectory of the Jordan Compact, a flagship initiative that brought together humanitarian, development and labour actors to create 'win-win' solutions for Syrians and Jordanians. Drawing on years of qualitative fieldwork in Jordan, the article traces how the Jordan Compact has made formalization an end in itself, with little regard for how much it actually benefits workers. It examines three central areas of programming: work permits, home-based businesses and working conditions. In each area, the article demonstrates how the chosen indicators have shaped initiatives while undermining meaningful reform. Bringing together insights from humanitarianism, development and critical labour studies, the analysis shows that indicator-oriented formalization, a form of measurement-driven governance, ostensibly produces impressive results, yet it can simultaneously undermine longer-term, multidimensional processes that would benefit workers more. The article advocates shifting the focus onto the individual and collective power of workers so that they can better realize the potential benefits of formalization.
Globalizations, Apr 5, 2023
This paper explores the politics of creating and calibrating monetary poverty indicators in Jorda... more This paper explores the politics of creating and calibrating monetary poverty indicators in Jordan using interviews with policy-shapers and documentary analysis. It highlights the significance of these dynamics for conceptualizing governance and statehood in the Middle East. I argue that poverty indicators have served a dual purpose: they have functioned as a tool of state legibility, seeking to enable governments to act on poverty and increase accountability. At the same time, opacity in their production has made it possible to shirk responsibility for worsening socioeconomic situations. The combination has helped to reproduce the state as a distinct entity that should, at least in principle, be able to tackle socioeconomic inequalities. By empirically and conceptually highlighting the intertwinement between transparency and opacity, the article not only contributes a new perspective to debates around governance through indicators, but also to deexceptionalizing the Middle East in discussions on the globalized politics of development.
Refugee Survey Quarterly, 2020
This article analyses the significance of policy legacies and policy memories for refugee policy ... more This article analyses the significance of policy legacies and policy memories for refugee policy in conflict-neighbouring countries, where most of the world's displaced live. Drawing on insights from critical policy analysis, it views refugee policy as co-produced by national and international agencies on the basis of previous dynamics that are already the product of an intense history of interaction and translation. This approach is illustrated by analysing two different aspects of refugee policy in Jordan: the process of counting Syrians in the country and the partial integration of Syrians into the formal labour market. Both examples reveal an overarching legacy of accommodation that ties international and host government actors together. Despite sometimes differing over preferred outcomes, the main goals for the various actors involved have been to strike compromises, safeguard organisational interests, and create outward policy success. In order to meet these goals, the agencies involved have learned to tolerate unresolved ambiguities and disregard other inconvenient legacies and memories that would only complicate policy negotiations. Acknowledging this intertwinement of agencies, technologies , and rationales of government is essential for rethinking policy change and responsibility in contexts of mass displacement.
Middle East Critique, 2019
Refugee response planners no longer frame Syrian refugees merely as objects of humanitarian care.... more Refugee response planners no longer frame Syrian refugees merely as objects of humanitarian care. Increasingly they are portrayed as enterprising subjects, whose formal integration into labor markets simultaneously can create self-sufficient actors and cure the economic woes of host countries. However, bringing together humanitarian and economic agendas is not an easy task. This article analyzes the contradictions and frictions that have emerged in the process of implementing the Jordan Compact, a political commitment to integrate Syrian refugees into the formal Jordanian labor market, and which is supposed to showcase such win-win strategies. It argues that the Jordan Compact should be seen as a policy model that has achieved enough consensus and incorporated enough disparate objectives to be labelled a ‘policy success.’ Yet, central actors have neglected core features of Jordan’s political economy and labor market, and/or the lives and survival strategies of refugees, such that their radical blueprints of transformation have been disrupted. Despite the widespread commitment to the scheme, it is thus unlikely that the Jordan Compact will both reinvigorate the Jordanian economy and offer Syrians the prospect of a dignified, self-sufficient life, an important lesson for comparable schemes being rolled out across the globe.
This paper analyzes projects of improvement and continuities of neglect found in two peripheral r... more This paper analyzes projects of improvement and continuities of neglect found in two peripheral regions in the rural south of Jordan. These areas have been framed as poverty pockets and singled out for special attention. Yet, despite the multitude of improvement projects targeting them since 1990, they have remained on the periphery. I argue that this has resulted from certain dynamics found within current strategies of intervention. These put people in their place as “locals” and render their concerns inferior to “national” or “global” interests. Accordingly, the transformations witnessed are best described as a socio-spatial re-fragmentation of governing strategies.
Journal für Entwicklungspolitik, 2008
Peripherie, 2017
The local translation of global political paradigms: on the politics of poverty reduction in Jord... more The local translation of global political paradigms: on the politics of poverty reduction in Jordan. This article analyses the role of local political forces and strategies in Jordan vis-a-vis the global agenda of poverty reduction. It argues that the development of poverty reduction policy, a new field of political intervention in Jordan since the 1990s, signifies the increased relevance of the global concept of poverty alleviation, which aims to target the poorest of the poor, helping them to help themselves. This global concept is being translated into the local political context, where it is articulated within the established Jordanian model of the paternalistic provider state. The emerging forms of social policy reflect the efforts of various groups who aim to have their strategies inscribed into the state’s apparatuses, as well as attempts from above to integrate politically relevant groups in symbolic and material terms and control those (socio-)political groups regarded as a...
Papers by Katharina Lenner
Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG eBooks, 2023
Handbook on the Governance and Politics of Migration, 2021
This innovative Handbook sets out a conceptual and analytical framework for the critical appraisa... more This innovative Handbook sets out a conceptual and analytical framework for the critical appraisal of migration governance. Global and interdisciplinary in scope, the chapters are organised across six key themes: conceptual debates; categorisations of migration; governance regimes; processes; spaces of migration governance; and mobilisations around it. .Leading international contributors critically assess categorisations and conceptualisations of migration to address theoretical concerns including transnationalism and de-colonisation, climate change, development, humanitarianism, bordering, technologies and the role of time. They closely examine practices of migration governance and politics, and their effects, across diverse spaces, processes and forms of mobilisation. They draw on up-to-date examples from across the globe in order to examine how migrants, whether forced or voluntary, are governed. Reviewing the latest developments in migration governance research through empirically rich and conceptually concise appraisals, the Handbook problematises orthodox perspectives and discusses how a critical reading can add to our understanding of the governance and politics of migration. This Handbook is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of migration, human rights and public policy. Its interdisciplinary approach and wide range of empirical examples will also be useful for policy makers in these fields.
Institute for Social Justice and Conflict Resolution, 2021
CBRL Research blog, 2019
“We don’t want sheep or chicken, we just want to leave this country”, a Syrian man in his fifties... more “We don’t want sheep or chicken, we just want to leave this country”, a Syrian man in his fifties said at a focus group I convened in Mafraq, Jordan in August 2017. We were there to discuss his and other refugees’ participation in a new cash for work project funded by the German government. The programme puts Syrian and Jordanian participants to work as municipal waste pickers for a few weeks or months, and then gives them micro-grants and training courses on establishing small businesses. A suggested strategy upon graduation is to buy sheep or chickens to raise and sell their products. The man at the focus group wanted none of that....
Analysis of the implementation of the Jordan Compact offers three key lessons: governmental appro... more Analysis of the implementation of the Jordan Compact offers three key lessons: governmental approval is important but not sufficient, the incorporation of critical voices is crucial, and meeting numeric targets is not the same as achieving underlying goals.
يقدَّم لنا تنفيذ العقد مع الأردن ثالثة دروس يمكن الاستفادة منها وهي أن َّ الموافقة الحكومية ضرو... more يقدَّم لنا تنفيذ العقد مع الأردن ثالثة دروس يمكن الاستفادة منها وهي أن َّ الموافقة الحكومية ضرورية
لكنَّها لا تكفي، وأن َّ إشراك أصحاب الأصوات المهمة أمر أساسي، َّ وأن َّ التوصل إلى الأرقام المستهدفة لا
يحقق بالضرورة الأهداف المرجوة
This paper analyses the politics surrounding the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan, the country tha... more This paper analyses the politics surrounding the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan, the country that, along with Lebanon, hosts the largest Syrian refugee population in relation to its overall population. It focuses in particular on the significance of policy legacies and policy memories for shaping perceptions of Syrian refugees and practices of managing them. It is based on the hypothesis that past experiences with large influxes of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees in Jordan have shaped the Syria refugee response as much as the policy blueprints and professional experiences of international and national humanitarian and development actors present in Jordan, as well as other actors, including refugees themselves. The paper illustrates this confluence by analysing two salient aspects of the response: the numerous contradictory ways in which Syrian refugees are counted; and the shaping of labour regulations, particularly the negotiations around providing work permits for Syrians. It argues that in all cases, overlapping regulations and ambivalences, which stem from assembled policy legacies and memories, have been key to ‘policy success’, in the sense that they have made it possible to tie a heterogeneous set of agencies and actors together and create a semblance of coherence.
Jordan and Lebanon have both generously received refugees from Syria since the outbreak of the cr... more Jordan and Lebanon have both generously received refugees from Syria since the outbreak of the crisis in 2011. Of all neighbouring countries they host the largest number of Syrian refugees relative to their overall populations. Yet after years of relative openness new regulations have made entry and movement more difficult while making lives more precarious. Syrian refugees have also been severely affected by funding shortages in the global humanitarian response. The resulting squeeze has led to an increasing sense of despair and many have attempted to leave both countries. The situation, however, is arguably worse in Lebanon than it is in Jordan. Syrian refugees in Jordan have experienced glimpses of hope since the February 2016 donors conference, which promised to facilitate their access to the labour market. This article introduces some parallels, as well as notable differences in the way the Syrian refugee crisis has evolved in both countries, particularly over the course of 2015-6.
L'analyse de l'application du Pacte pour la Jordanie nous livre trois enseignements clés : l'appr... more L'analyse de l'application du Pacte pour la Jordanie nous livre trois enseignements clés : l'approbation gouvernementale est importante, sans toutefois être suffisante, la prise en compte des opinions critiques est indispensable, et le fait d'atteindre les chiffres-cibles n'est pas la même chose que réaliser les objectifs fondamentaux.
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Peer-reviewed Articles by Katharina Lenner
The article shows that that while early British proposals for protection through multi-purpose national parks would have led to a relatively inclusive form of conservation, they did not materialise on the ground. What instead became dominant during the subsequent phase of American hegemony in Jordan was a fortress conservation model that excluded local populations from using as well as managing the resources of protected areas. This legacy, it argues, cast a long shadow into the 1990s’ turn towards “integrated conservation and development” as a new model. The success of this model, and the way it shaped organizational dynamics of the RSCN – the agency mandated with protected area management in Jordan - has hindered contemporary efforts to transition to community-led forms of conservation. This points to a need for appreciating deeply engrained institutional dynamics, as well as continued experiences of dispossession by local residents as major factors preventing the establishment of less exclusive forms of conservation.
Papers by Katharina Lenner
لكنَّها لا تكفي، وأن َّ إشراك أصحاب الأصوات المهمة أمر أساسي، َّ وأن َّ التوصل إلى الأرقام المستهدفة لا
يحقق بالضرورة الأهداف المرجوة
The article shows that that while early British proposals for protection through multi-purpose national parks would have led to a relatively inclusive form of conservation, they did not materialise on the ground. What instead became dominant during the subsequent phase of American hegemony in Jordan was a fortress conservation model that excluded local populations from using as well as managing the resources of protected areas. This legacy, it argues, cast a long shadow into the 1990s’ turn towards “integrated conservation and development” as a new model. The success of this model, and the way it shaped organizational dynamics of the RSCN – the agency mandated with protected area management in Jordan - has hindered contemporary efforts to transition to community-led forms of conservation. This points to a need for appreciating deeply engrained institutional dynamics, as well as continued experiences of dispossession by local residents as major factors preventing the establishment of less exclusive forms of conservation.
لكنَّها لا تكفي، وأن َّ إشراك أصحاب الأصوات المهمة أمر أساسي، َّ وأن َّ التوصل إلى الأرقام المستهدفة لا
يحقق بالضرورة الأهداف المرجوة