- Convenors:
-
Ayesha Khurshid
(University of Massachusetts Boston)
Nazia Hassan (KU Leuven)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Gendered, generational & social justice
Short Abstract
This panel examines inclusion as both a moral discourse and a governance tool in development, exploring how migration, disability, and education policies shape power, mobility, and agency—and whether inclusion remains transformative in uncertain global futures.
Description
Inclusion has become a leading principle in global development—invoked across education, migration, and disability frameworks as the moral discourse of equity and participation. Yet underlying this progressive discourse are more nuanced economic and bureaucratic logics that govern who is recognized as “included,” how inclusion is measured, and for what purpose. This panel unpacks inclusion as both a discourse of justice and a technology of governance, exploring how development institutions such as the World Bank, UN agencies, and bilateral donors translate moral imperatives into measurable, fundable, and scalable interventions.
In a global context of deepening precarity, digitalization, and human mobility, the panel (re)positions inclusion within broader political economies of migration and knowledge production. It asks: How do inclusion-informed agendas reframe power relations among states, markets, and communities? How do displaced and transnational communities rethink belonging under such regimes? And what forms of agency emerge when local actors reimagine or resist top-down frameworks?
The panel invites contributions addressing three key themes:
Inclusion and Mobility – migration, displacement, and cross-border governance as negotiated spaces of belonging;
Managerial Rationalities of Equity – how data systems and funding mechanisms convert moral aims into bureaucratic accountability;
Reclaiming Agency and Futures – how communities in the Global South reimagine inclusion beyond institutional frames.
By integrating economic sociology, policy analysis, and critical development studies, this panel re-focuses power and agency, asking whether inclusion can still serve as a transformative framework in uncertain futures.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper examines African agency and resistance in response to European externalisation policies that outsource migration control to African states. It argues that these policies not only undermine African countries' sovereignty but also provoke innovative strategies of resistance and negotiation
Paper long abstract
This paper examines African agency and resistance in response to European externalisation policies that outsource migration control to African states. It argues that these externalisation policies not only undermine African countries' sovereignty but also provoke innovative strategies of resistance and negotiation. While European actors frame migration primarily as a security threat, African states and migrants engage dynamically with these policies, exhibiting forms of proactive resistance, negotiation, and adaptation that challenge Eurocentric governance models. By centering African perspectives, the study highlights how states and regional actors navigate power asymmetries, asserting sovereignty in the face of external pressures. Drawing on qualitative case studies from West and North Africa—including instances of moratoria on deportations, delayed return agreements, and grassroots activism—the study highlights how African actors assert sovereignty and reshape migration governance amidst external pressure. Utilising a decolonial theoretical framework, the paper critiques the colonial continuities embedded in externalisation practices and emphasises the political and intellectual efforts by African states and civil society to reclaim migration governance. This research contributes to reimagining migration futures and policy frameworks that respect African sovereignty, support migrant rights, and promote regional cooperation. The findings underscore the need to move beyond Eurocentric narratives to acknowledge African agency as central to understanding and addressing global migration challenges.
Keywords: Decolonisation, Migration Governance, African Agency, Sovereignty, European Externalisation
Paper short abstract
The Paris Agreements first Global Stocktake (GST) expanded access but reproduced hidden power asymmetries. This research reveals how participation, knowledge, and influence were unevenly distributed and outlines reforms for more inclusive future stocktakes
Paper long abstract
The Global Stocktake (GST) is the Paris Agreement’s central mechanism for assessing collective progress and is mandated to operate “in the light of equity” with broad participation. While the first GST (GST-1) was widely portrayed as inclusive, little systematic analysis has examined how inclusivity was constructed and practiced. This article evaluates GST-1 through a power-sensitive framework that conceptualises participation across visible, hidden, and invisible dimensions. Based on participant observation across GST phases, 26 semi-structured interviews and document analysis of Party and non-Party stakeholder submissions on the learnings of GST-1, the study traces both discursive understandings of inclusivity and the structural conditions shaping actors’ ability to influence the process.
Findings show that the Technical Dialogue of the first GST expanded formal access—through world cafés, roundtables, and diverse inputs—yet longstanding power asymmetries persisted. Visa barriers, funding constraints, delegation size, and linguistic disadvantages limited meaningful engagement for many actors from the Majority world. Epistemic hierarchies privileged scientific and technocratic expertise, constraining the recognition of Indigenous, local, and experiential knowledge despite its procedural endorsement. In the political phase, agenda-setting dynamics and informal bargaining further reduced the influence of low-power stakeholders.
The article argues that procedural equity in the GST cannot be equated with broad participation alone; it requires confronting the power relations that shape whose knowledge and preferences meaningfully enter deliberation and outcomes. It concludes by outlining reforms for future GST cycles, including stronger support for developing-country participation, broader epistemic inclusion, and improved linkage between technical deliberation and political decision-making.
Paper short abstract
This study investigates how Afghan youth’s sustainable livelihood in Pakistan is linked to their (im)mobility across international borders. Likewise, how their repatriation to their native country affect their economic opportunities in Pakistan, and encourage their migration beyond Pakistan.
Paper long abstract
This study aims to explores how Afghan youth navigate economic self-reliance and inclusion in Pakistan and, in turn, how their sustained livelihood shape their (im)mobility beyond Pakistan and Afghanistan. Additionally, the study invistigates how the repatriation processes affect Afghan refugees’ economic sustanability. The study focuses on Afghan youth in Pakistan because, besides hosting millions of Afghans for over four decades, Pakistan is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, nor has it enacted any refugee-specific national legislation. The absence of a legal framework creates uncertainties for conflict-driven displaced Afghans in Pakistan, complicate their sustainable inclusion, and enforcing further migration across international borders. Moreover, the recent initiatives of repatriation/deportation of Afghans to their home country deepens legal crisis surrounding Afghans, their livelihoods and businesses, impacting further displacement and complicating borders’ governance. Therefore, by engaging the Fassin’s notion of “the moral economy of immigration, defined as a complex interplay of moral and economic norms/frameworks by which immigrants/refugees are thought and acted on” (2005, p.365), this study explores the interplay of refugees’ economic resilience and inclusion with borders’ sustainable governance in the context of global South/Pakistan. I propose to employ qualitative methods and will focuse on Afghan youth in the urban regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), as it hosts the largest number of Afghan refugees in Pakistan. The study adopts a gender-sensitive youth-centered approach, and critically engages the agency of young Afghan entrepreneurs, to explore how they experience the nexus of economic sustainability and borders governance in the context of Pakistan.
Paper short abstract
Hyderabad’s street vending reveals a "paradox of inclusion": high credit disbursal alongside spatial exclusion. Drawing on Roy and Lefebvre, this paper demonstrates how the 2014 Act perpetuates regulated informality and disguised wage labor. Spatial justice is vital for vendor agency and mobility.
Paper long abstract
In rapidly urbanizing cities of the Global South, inclusion has emerged as both a moral discourse and a central governance tool in development agendas. The inclusion of street vendors in the urban space is increasingly operationalized through legal recognition and credit-based interventions, framed as pathways to entrepreneurship and mobility. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with twenty street vendors in Hyderabad, this paper argues that state-led formalization and inclusion-driven development interventions operate as regulated informality, extending financial visibility while reproducing spatial exclusion within urban space shaped by aesthetic governance and selective enforcement. Grounded in Ananya Roy’s theory of informality as governance and Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the production of space, the paper analyses how urban spatial governance in Hyderabad is operationalised through the “Street Vendors Act, 2014.” The findings further destabilise neoliberal narratives of street vending as micro-entrepreneurship, revealing that many registered loan beneficiaries function as disguised wage labourers working under asset-owning intermediaries (Seths). Empirically, it contrasts the political patronage with the infrastructure-driven planning that fragments natural markets and displaces vendors. Such relations foster spatial insecurity, making the workers' presence contingent on patronage rather than a secure right to place. By prioritizing loan disbursals over infrastructure budgeting, the municipal corporation leaves vendors financially visible yet spatially insecure, with no dedicated budget for vending zones. This paper argues that informal mobility depends less on credit than on spatial justice, advocating for development frameworks that recognize the right to urban space as a fundamental pillar of vendor agency and well-being.
Paper short abstract
This paper investigates how inclusion is governed through accountability frameworks in international development. Analyzing the UN Disability Inclusion scorecard, it shows how equity is operationalized through performance indicators and reporting, redefining power and agency in development praxis.
Paper long abstract
This paper asks: how does inclusion operationalize power and agency in international development when analyzed through performance scorecards. Incorporating the panel’s theme of managerial rationalities of equity, the paper unpacks how moral imperatives of inclusion are translated into benchmarking frameworks of accountability that facilitates measurement, comparability, and administrative governance of equity.
Rooted in Interpretive Policy Analysis (Fischer, 2003; Yanow, 2000) the paper examines the Entity Accountability Framework and scorecards within the United Nations Disability Inclusion Strategy (2019). Approaching the scorecard as an interpretive artifact, it investigates how indicators, performance levels, and evidence requirements articulate what counts as inclusion and who has the knowledge/expertise to assess it. Hence, it examines how equity is defined through validation procedures, reporting cycles, and institutional reviews instead of evaluation of outcomes.
Therefore, the paper argues that the scorecard does not invalidate inclusion but manages it; embedding justice in alignment with bureaucratic accountability. Nevertheless, this discourse of managerial rationality anchors development praxis by limiting the policy logics of equity and the forms of agency that can be institutionally named. The analysis becomes relevant for development studies by revealing how inclusion is governed through technical expertise that critically questions the future of transformative justice within international development.
Paper short abstract
Uttarakhand's "ghost villages" reveal a gap between inclusion as discourse and governance. Despite statehood, out-migration persists as communities exit failed bureaucratic systems. This study argues that performative metrics and plains-centric models maintain structural exclusion in the hills.
Paper long abstract
In 2000, India created Uttarakhand as a separate state explicitly to include its marginalised hill populations in development through autonomous governance. The Uttarakhand statehood movement, spanning several decades, raised demands for recognition and responsive policies addressing the hill-specific challenges and development deficits as well as accelerating out-migration, which threatened the demographic viability of mountain communities. Twenty-five years later, over 2,000 hilly villages stand either empty or near-abandoned, and out-migration has intensified rather than reversed, clearly indicating the failure of inclusion and the state. This study examines these emerging trends in Uttarakhand and argues that out-migration from the hilly regions represents an active exit by the people from the state's inclusion narrative due to continuous marginalisation and exclusion.
Drawing on historical analysis and in-depth interviews, this study demonstrates that development policies designed for "inclusive growth" remained ineffective in tackling the everyday needs of hilly regions and people. The study identifies three critical failures: managerial inclusion that prioritises bureaucratic metrics over tangible benefits, political representation that lacks economic redistribution, and epistemic exclusion that imposes plains-centric development models while dismissing local hilly needs and knowledge.
The research reframes out-migration not merely as a policy failure, but as an assertion of agency, a refusal of development on the hilly region's terms. Similarly, those who remain behind, primarily the elderly population, stay largely invisible to the state. Ultimately, these ghost villages function as spatial manifestations of governance failure, revealing how bureaucratic rationalities can coexist with substantive exclusion.
Paper short abstract
Despite legal reforms, 70% of Nigerian children with disabilities remain out of school. This paper examines how fiscal constraints and governance practices limit inclusive education's transformative potential, while exploring how advocates and communities navigate these challenges.
Paper long abstract
Nigeria has approximately 18.3 million out-of-school children, with children with disabilities among the most persistently excluded. Despite ratifying the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2010 and enacting the Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities Act in 2018, an estimated 70% of children with disabilities remain excluded from formal education, and over 85% of schools lack basic physical accessibility. These patterns raise critical questions about the material and political costs of inclusion.
This paper examines inclusive education in Nigeria as both a rights-based commitment and a governance challenge shaped by resource politics. Drawing on federal and state policy documents, education budget data (2018-2024), Nigeria's delayed CRPD State Party Report (2021), civil society reports including the State of Disability Inclusion Report (2024), the analysis applies frameworks of intersectionality, reasonable accommodation, and vertical equity to trace how global inclusion norms translate into domestic implementation.
The findings demonstrate significant structural gaps. Public education spending remains at approximately 0.35% of GDP, far below UNESCO's 4-6% benchmark, while disability-specific allocations remain weakly defined. Although 23 of Nigeria's 36 states have enacted disability legislation, fragmented institutional coordination has resulted in inclusion functioning largely as symbolic compliance rather than redistributive intervention.
At the same time, the paper documents adaptive responses by civil society and sub-national actors, highlighting tensions between technocratic governance and grassroots mobilisation. Situating Nigeria within broader Sub-Saharan African patterns, the paper questions whether inclusion frameworks can deliver equitable development futures when the price of inclusion remains politically contested and fiscally constrained.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how inclusion shapes displacement and protection governance at the intersection of climate and development. It analyzes how legal categorizations in refugee and migration regimes produce protection gaps for environmentally displaced populations under conditions of uncertainty.
Paper long abstract
Climate and development related displacement has become a pressing development challenge, yet existing protection frameworks continue to rely on narrow categorizations that shape who is in need of international protection and assistance. Drawing on critical development studies and critical legal studies, this paper examines inclusion as a governing practice through which displacement and protection are conceptualized and rendered legible within institutional regimes.
Focusing on displacement at the intersection of climate change and development, particularly in African contexts marked by climate vulnerability and development intervention, the paper explores how protection regimes remain organized around categorical distinctions such as refugee, internally displaced person, or development displaced population. These distinctions structure legal status, access to rights, and institutional responses, even when lived experiences of displacement are shaped by overlapping environmental, economic, and political processes. Under conditions of increasing climate uncertainty, such classificatory architectures raise questions about how mobility is governed when causes of displacement cannot be easily disentangled.
The paper further examines how inclusion is operationalized through legal and policy frameworks that prioritize administrative responses over durable protection. In this sense, inclusion functions less as an expansive rights based framework than as a technique that organizes mobility, limits obligations, and stabilizes development trajectories. This institutionalization of inclusion can extend recognition while constraining agency. By foregrounding inclusion as a modality of governance, the paper contributes to debates on how migration and protection policies shape power and mobility in uncertain futures, and under what conditions inclusion reconfigures protection or reproduces existing hierarchies within displacement governance.