Political economy of housing and tenure dynamics

MSM Assistant Professor and Research Fellow Nora Stel recently published a paper in the working paper series of Yale University’s and Gothenburg University’s joint Governance and Local Development Program.

She previously presented the work on which the paper is based at the Service Provision in a Changing Arab World conference at Yale University (New Haven, 9-10 April 2015).

The paper draws on Nora’s PhD research in Lebanon’s informal Palestinian refugee communities that explores on the ground governance arrangements between Lebanese and Palestinian authorities. Fieldwork for the study was supported by a grant from Yale University’s Council on Middle Eastern Studies.

The paper, titled ‘Facilitating Facts on the Ground. The ‘politics of uncertainty’ and the governance of housing, land, and tenure in the Palestinian gathering of Qasmiye, South Lebanon’, explores the political economy of housing and tenure dynamics in an informal Palestinian settlement, a so-called ‘gathering’ in South Lebanon. Palestinians living in the gatherings fall outside the protection regime of the Lebanese state because they lack citizenship. They are also partly excluded from the UN’s service mandate because they do not reside in official camps. The consequences of this institutional ambiguity are especially pertinent in the governance of housing, land, and tenure. Institutional ambiguity complicates construction and exposes residents of the gatherings to eviction. A case study of the governance of property in Qasmiye gathering documents how the state of exception in Lebanon’s Palestinian gatherings is upheld by what can be called a “politics of uncertainty” in which both Lebanese and Palestinian authorities deliberately maintain institutional ambiguity.