The 'local Turn,' in Refugee Governance: An Ethnography of Refugee-Led Organizations (RLOs) in the Rohingya Refugee Camps in Bangladesh.

The ‘local turn', ‘localisation’ and ‘global-local dynamics’ have gained renewed interest and importance in understanding peacebuilding, humanitarian policy and refugee governance. For some time, particularly in the UN system and their allies, we have seen the use of ‘local governance’, ‘local capacities’, ‘local ownership’, and ‘local agency’. However, recent research has shown that the use of ‘the local’ was rather rhetorical, and, in reality, it has been neglected. The ‘local’ has also been used as an instrument in promoting a (neo)liberal agenda and hence requires a critical reflection on the use of ‘local’. Thus, taking the ‘local’ turn in humanitarian and refugee governance as a point of departure, this paper aims to explore the grassroots mobilisation by the Refugee-Led Organizations (RLOs) in refugee camps to understand how ‘localisation’ unfolds in humanitarian and refugee governance in the global South. This paper is based on an ethnographic study of the world’s largest refugee camps in Bangladesh. This paper shows the acknowledgment of the existence of the RLOs is almost non-existent. Yet, some of the RLOs are recognized by the international system. Therefore, a preference towards bigger and ‘important’ RLOs indicates a discrimination to the others and thus has produced a complex interaction process that can be termed as ‘friction’. In addition, national institutions have emerged as a coercive actors in refugee governance and imposed strong surveillance on these RLOs. Using a decolonial lens, it is obvious that power relations between (inter)national institutions and the local are asymmetrical. International institutions still use a ‘capacity development/building’ approach rooted in colonial modernity, to work with the RLOs. Despite the huge potential of grassroot mobilisation by the camp-based community organizations (RLOs) in different Rohingya camps in Bangladesh, partnership and mutual respect and learning trajectory between the international, national and the local are absent there.