How do people living in a refugee camp engage with legal practices, discourses, and institutions? Critics argue that refugee camps leave people in “legal limbo” depriving them of the “right to have rights” despite the presence of international humanitarian actors and the entitlements enshrined in international law. For that reason, refugee camps have become a highly visible symbol of failed human rights campaigns. In contrast, I found in an ethnography of the Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana, West Africa, that although people living as refugees faced chronic insecurity and injustice, they engaged extensively with several different facets of the law. I illuminate three interrelated dimensions of their experiences: (1) their development as international legal subjects; (2) their alienation from domestic legal institutions; and (3) their agency within the legal field. The article contributes to the research agenda on law in humanitarian settings an empirically grounded account of the subjective dimensions of legal alienation and mobilization in a refugee camp. More broadly, it contributes to international human rights debates by theorizing a mixed outcome of international human rights campaigns: the emergence of wards of international law, people deeply embedded in the international legal system, but alienated from local law.

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Engaging youth and women in data-scarce, least developed countries (LDCs) is gaining attention in the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) arena, as is using citizen science as a multi-faceted mechanism for data collection, engendering personal empowerment and agency. Involving these populations in citizen science is a powerful synergy that simultaneously addresses the Leave-No-One-Behind promise in the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda, yet most citizen science takes place in the Global North, and attention to LDCs is needed. This article highlights a four-year, four-location, hydrology-focused, interdisciplinary citizen science initiative (CSI) in the Upper Blue Nile Basin, Ethiopia. Through a systematic evaluation, we explore scientific applications of the hydrologic data, as well as the social dimensions in the CSI, towards building a social and technical capacity that supports the SDGs at the local and international scale. In the CSI, Ethiopian high school students received training from local university faculty and graduate students, collecting river stage and groundwater level measurements, and farmers conducted soil resistivity measurements using a novel sensor technology developed for the study area. We found the datasets to be ample for use to locally validate regional groundwater models and seasonal forecasts on soil moisture and streamflow. We conducted written interviews with the students, which revealed their ability to perceive benefits of engagement in the CSI, as well as recognize their increased individual technical capacity. An analysis of the hydrological data demonstrates the readiness of the datasets to be used for evaluating water-related interventions that facilitate the SDGs, broadly, by building synergies between individuals and institutions. As such, we map how both the hydrologic data and experiences of the citizen scientists support the SDGs at the Goal and Target-level, while forging new social and technical pathways.

In view of Ethiopia’s significant renewable energy (RE) potential and the dynamic interactions among the components of the Water–Energy–Food (WEF) Nexus, we attempted to incorporate solar and small-scale hydropower into the optimal design of an environmentally friendly microgrid with the primary goal of ensuring the sustainability of irrigation water pumping, while taking advantage of existing infrastructure in various small administrative units (kebele). Any additional generated energy would be made available to the community for other needs, such as lighting and cooking, to support health and food security and improve the general quality of life. The novelty of the study stems from the utilization of in situ social data, retrieved during fieldwork interviews conducted in the kebele of interest, to ascertain the actual needs and habits of the local people. Based on these combined efforts, we were able to formulate a realistic energy demand plan for climatic conditions typical of Sub-Saharan Africa agricultural communities and analyze four different scenarios of the microgrid’s potential functionality and capital cost, given different tolerance levels of scheduled outages. We demonstrated that the RE-based microgrid would be socially and environmentally beneficial and its capital cost sensitive to the incorporation of individual or communal machines and appliances. Ultimately, the social impact investigation revealed the design would be welcomed by the local community, whose members already implement tailor-made solutions to support their agricultural activities. Finally, we argue that extended educational programs and unambiguous policies should be in place before any implementation to ensure the venture’s sustainability and functionality.

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