After the Encampment Era: Rethinking Refugee Access to Land, Housing, and Economic Opportunity

“After the Encampment Era: Rethinking Refugee Access to Land, Housing, and Economic Opportunity” will focus on forced displacement policy, which sits at the intersection of all four of PWH’s core pillars—climate change, democracy, global justice and human rights, and security. The project’s core goal is to move the policy conversation from crisis management — patching a collapsing encampment model — toward a forward-looking agenda centered on the structural conditions for refugee self-reliance. The primary audiences are the institutions actually making prioritization and hosting-policy decisions under fiscal constraint, such as the UNHCR, the World Bank and World Food Programme, bilateral donors, host-country governments, and researchers and non-profits who advocate on behalf of refugees. This project will be carried out jointly with Penn’s PDRI-DevLab.

Faculty Lead on this Project

Guy Grossman is the David M. Knott professor of global politics and international relations. A leading scholar of comparative politics whose research focuses on governance, migration, human trafficking, and conflict processes (mostly) in the context of developing countries. Grossman uses large-scale field experiments to answer central questions about the political causes and consequences of migration and forced displacement. His research has received support from the Fund for Innovation in Development, Development Innovation Ventures, IPA and J-PAL’s Displaced Livelihoods Initiative, UNHCR-World Bank Joint Data Center, Penn Global, and the Program to End Modern Slavery, among other grants.

Dr. Grossman is the author of numerous books and scholarly articles. In 2022, he won a Political Ties Award for Best Published Article from APSA’s Political Networks Section for his article Viral Voting: Social Networks and Political Participation. He is the founder and co-director of Penn’s Development Research Initiative (PDRI-DevLab), a faculty affiliate of The Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration Study, a member of Wharton’s Lauder Graduate Group in International Studies, and an advisory board member of Perry World House and the Penn Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics.