Vulnerability to Agency: What My Refugee Experience Taught Me About Sustainable Development
Daniel Muhwezi Week 1 Reflection | Sustainable Development Policy & Governance
Vulnerability to Agency: What My Refugee Experience Taught Me About Sustainable Development
By Daniel Muhwezi
Week 1 Reflection | Sustainable Development Policy & Governance
I was born in Ishasha, Bwisha, in Rutshuru, North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Later, I became a refugee in Uganda and lived in Kyangwali Refugee Settlement in western Uganda. Long before I encountered sustainable development as an academic field, I experienced many of its central questions in everyday life.
In Kyangwali, social problems were deeply interconnected. Poverty affected education. Limited educational opportunities affected employment. Weak access to health services affected household well-being. Young people faced unemployment and few pathways to further education. Families lacked access to financial services. Schools operated with overcrowded classrooms, limited books and learning materials, too few teachers, and, in some cases, teachers without adequate training.
My own education reflected many of these challenges. I had come from a French-language education system in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and had to learn in English in Uganda. I walked long distances to school. There was no school lunch. Uniforms, books, and other scholastic materials were difficult for my family to afford. I remember studying at night using a kerosene lamp and teaching myself English through persistent practice, self-study, and discussions with friends. On weekends and sometimes early in the morning, I worked in other people's gardens to help raise money for school necessities, while my parents supported me with what they could.
Around me, other young people faced similar or even greater barriers. Some left school. Many girls, in particular, disappeared from classrooms through early marriage and other pressures.
At the time, I did not have the language of “complex adaptive systems,” “institutional arrangements,” or “sustainable-development pathways.” But I was living inside a system in which education, poverty, gender, employment, institutions, livelihoods, and social relationships continually affected one another.
That experience came back to me strongly during the first week of my doctoral course in Sustainable Development Policy and Governance.
Sustainable Development Is More Than Economic Growth
One of the important lessons from our first week was the danger of reductionism: trying to understand sustainable development mainly through one dimension, such as economic growth or environmental protection. Our course instead asks us to critically examine alternative policy and governance frameworks, including complex adaptive systems and institutional approaches.
Jeffrey Sachs provides a useful starting point. He describes sustainable development as having three major dimensions—economic development, broad-based social inclusion, and environmental sustainability—supported by good governance (Sachs, 2015). That definition resonates with my experience because poverty in a refugee settlement cannot be addressed simply by increasing income. A young person may need income, but also education, health care, social inclusion, financial services, functioning institutions, and an opportunity to participate in decisions affecting their future.
Likewise, access to education cannot be separated from household economics. A child may technically have a school nearby, but what does access mean if the family cannot afford a uniform, books, sanitary materials, or food? What does educational opportunity mean when classrooms are overcrowded or when teachers lack adequate resources?
Sustainable development therefore requires us to look beyond whether a service formally exists and ask whether people actually have the capabilities and institutional conditions to benefit from it.
Limits, Resources, and Interconnected Systems
Meadows, Randers, and Meadows (2004) add another layer to this discussion. Their work on limits and overshoot challenges the assumption that technology, markets, or continued economic expansion can automatically solve every problem. They emphasize ecological limits, feedback, delays, natural resources, and deliberate societal choices.
For me, this raises an important question about refugee settlements and other places experiencing rapid social and demographic change. When thousands of people depend on limited land, schools, health infrastructure, natural resources, employment opportunities, and humanitarian services, pressures in one area can quickly affect others.
An overcrowded school is not simply an “education problem.” It may reflect displacement, population growth, financing limitations, infrastructure constraints, teacher shortages, governance decisions, and household poverty simultaneously. This is why systems thinking matters.
Clark and Harley (2020) argue that nature and society are deeply intertwined and that sustainability should be understood through integrated development pathways rather than isolated categories. They also emphasize that development pathways are context dependent and shaped by particular configurations of actors, institutions, power, and historical legacies.
That idea describes much of what I experienced. Refugees do not enter empty spaces. They become part of existing ecological, economic, political, cultural, and institutional systems. Sustainable policy therefore requires understanding those relationships rather than treating each development challenge in isolation.
From Individual Struggle to Collective Action
My own educational journey eventually took an unexpected turn. Through hard work, self-study, support from my family, and study with friends, I performed strongly in Uganda's national primary examinations and received a scholarship that enabled me to continue my education.
There, I met other refugee students who shared similar experiences. We began asking a simple but important question: if we had found ways to overcome some of these educational barriers, how could we help other young people do the same?
That question eventually contributed to the founding of CIYOTA. Our response did not begin with a large institution or major funding. We began by mobilizing ourselves and our community. We coached and tutored younger students so they could perform better in national examinations and compete for scholarships. We worked in farms to raise money to buy uniforms and books for students who could not afford them. We purchased textbooks and helped establish a village mobile library.
What began as young people responding to problems around us gradually became institution building. Over time, the community developed schools serving children from early childhood through secondary education. Students remained in school, improved academically, earned scholarships, attended universities, returned to serve their communities, and in some cases established social enterprises and other initiatives.
Looking back through the lens of this week's readings, I now see this experience differently. It was not simply a story of “helping vulnerable refugees.” It was a story of collective action.
My Journey Was Never Mine Alone
It is equally important that I do not tell this story as though determination alone explains my journey. My achievements have depended on an ecosystem of people, institutions, policies, and opportunities.
Uganda welcomed my family and many others as refugees and provided a place in which we could begin rebuilding our lives. At critical stages of my education, scholarships and institutional support opened doors that hard work alone could not have opened. Support from the Dr. Hugh Austin Windle Pilkington (Windle Charitable Trust) helped me continue my secondary education. Educate! supported later stages of my schooling. The DAFI scholarship enabled my studies at Makerere University, and the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program supported my graduate education at Michigan State University. Today, my doctoral journey at the University of Vermont is supported through Leadership for the Ecozoic and the Gund Institute for Environment. Along the way, individual donors, teachers, mentors, friends, family members, and community members invested in me, encouraged me, and created opportunities that shaped my path.
These experiences remind me that resilience should not be romanticized as an individual achievement. People exercise agency within institutional environments that can either expand or restrict their opportunities. My own story was shaped by hard work and persistence, but also by policies, scholarships, mentors, organizations, communities, and institutions that made continued education possible.
Refugees as Institutional Actors
Elinor Ostrom's work helps explain why this distinction matters. Ostrom (2005) challenges approaches that assume communities facing collective problems must always wait for external authorities to design solutions for them. Her institutional analysis demonstrates how people can, under appropriate conditions, communicate, build trust, devise rules, organize themselves, and create institutional arrangements for addressing shared problems. She also cautions against searching for one perfect institutional solution: institutional reforms are experiments embedded in changing ecological, economic, social, and political settings (Ostrom, 2005).
This gives me a different vocabulary for understanding what we were doing. CIYOTA was not merely delivering services. We were creating institutional arrangements around education, cooperation, resource mobilization, accountability, and community participation.
Later, I carried a similar idea into economic development through Ubuntu Trust. Many people in displaced communities were excluded from conventional financial services even though they were working, farming, trading, saving, and trying to build livelihoods. We supported community savings groups, financial access, smallholder farmers, entrepreneurs, and other locally driven economic activities.
Again, the central question was not simply, “What can we give people?” It was also: What systems can people build together that expand their capacity to solve problems?
Whose Knowledge Counts?
Clark and Harley (2020) push this issue further by emphasizing actors, institutions, power, and knowledge. They describe actors as entities possessing agency—the ability to choose or decide—and institutions as the rules, norms, rights, culture, and shared beliefs that shape social behavior and relationships. They also emphasize that power affects actors' ability to influence institutions and outcomes.
This makes me think about the language often used to describe refugees. We frequently hear terms such as beneficiary, vulnerable population, recipient, or person of concern. Those descriptions may identify genuine needs, but they can also unintentionally hide people's capabilities.
My experience has shown me another side of displaced communities: parents sacrificing for their children's education; young people tutoring one another; communities creating savings groups; refugees building schools and businesses; people sharing knowledge across generations; and graduates returning to invest their skills in the communities that supported them.
Clark and Harley's (2020) discussion of knowledge co-production is especially important here. They argue that knowledge is more likely to influence practice when it emerges through dialogue rather than one-way communication, and they raise fundamental questions about whose expertise and interests are recognized or excluded.
That leads me to ask: When we design policies for displaced communities, whose knowledge are we treating as expertise?
A refugee farmer may understand local agricultural constraints differently from an international consultant. A mother may understand why girls leave school in ways that administrative statistics cannot reveal. Young refugees may recognize barriers to employment that policy documents overlook. Community leaders may understand trust, informal institutions, and social networks in ways that outside organizations do not.
Academic and technical knowledge remain important. But sustainable development may be stronger when professional expertise and lived knowledge inform one another.
Beyond Vulnerability
My first week studying sustainable development has therefore made me reconsider a story I have lived for many years. The dominant question in refugee policy is often: What do refugees need?
That is an essential question. Refugees may urgently need protection, food, shelter, health care, education, and economic opportunities. But it should not be the only question.
We should also ask: What knowledge, capabilities, relationships, institutions, and ideas already exist within displaced communities? What prevents those capacities from flourishing? Who has the power to make decisions? What kinds of institutions allow people to organize collectively? How can outside organizations support local agency without replacing it?
These questions move us from a purely vulnerability-centered approach toward one that recognizes both vulnerability and agency.
For me, that distinction is deeply personal. I have experienced displacement and exclusion, but I have also witnessed refugees become teachers, entrepreneurs, community organizers, institution builders, and problem-solvers. I have seen young people who once lacked textbooks eventually help create schools. I have seen people excluded from formal financial systems organize savings and lending mechanisms within their communities. I have seen students who once needed scholarships eventually graduate from universities and return to help others.
These experiences do not mean refugee communities can or should solve every structural problem themselves. Governments, international institutions, markets, donors, and public systems remain essential. Ostrom's work cautions against simplistic universal solutions, while sustainability science reminds us that institutions, resources, power, and context continually interact (Clark & Harley, 2020; Ostrom, 2005).
The lesson is different: People experiencing a development problem should not automatically be treated only as the objects of its solution. They can also be authors of that solution.
That may be the most important idea I am carrying from Week 1.
As I begin doctoral study in sustainable development policy and governance, I want to continue exploring what happens when we shift our perspective from seeing displaced people primarily as vulnerable beneficiaries toward recognizing them as actors capable of generating knowledge, building institutions, organizing collective action, and shaping sustainable-development pathways.
My emerging question is:
How can sustainable-development policy move beyond treating displaced people primarily as beneficiaries and instead create the institutional conditions through which their agency, knowledge, and collective capacity can flourish?
Perhaps the question for sustainable development is therefore not simply how we can build better programs for communities. It is how we can build institutions and governance systems that make it possible to build better futures with them.
Acknowledgment
I remain deeply grateful to the Government of Uganda for hosting refugees and providing a place from which my family and I could rebuild; to the scholarship programs and educational institutions that supported my journey; and to the many donors, teachers, mentors, friends, family members, and community members who believed in me and invested in my education and leadership. Their contributions are part of this story.
References
Clark, W. C., & Harley, A. G. (2020). Sustainability science: Toward a synthesis. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 45, 331–386.
Meadows, D. H., Randers, J., & Meadows, D. L. (2004). Limits to growth: The 30-year update. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Ostrom, E. (2005). Understanding institutional diversity. Princeton University Press.
Sachs, J. D. (2015). The age of sustainable development. Columbia University Press.
Author's Note on AI Use
Generative AI was used as a writing and editing support tool to help organize, refine, and improve the clarity of this reflection. The lived experiences, interpretations, arguments, and conclusions expressed here are my own.