Forced Displacement, Vulnerability, and Social Cohesion

An extensive literature in social sciences suggests that feeling financially secure can breed trust, facilitate meaningful social interactions, and increase the willingness to share resources with others. Financial security may be particularly important for social cohesion in settings characterized by scarce resources, low income, and high social fragmentation. This piece discusses the challenges of promoting social cohesion in a specifically challenging setting: among ultra-poor refugees trying to integrate into similarly impoverished host communities in the Global South. Through a randomized experiment among 460 participants, we find that improving financial security of both refugees and host community members through large cash transfers and employment support increases the level of trust, promotes more friendships with out-groups, and increases the willingness for host community members to be willing to share resources with refugees. Refugees are also more likely to show signs of feeling integrated into the community as they are more optimistic about the future and they are more likely to feel that they belong in Mozambique, up to two years after the intervention took place. However, these gains in social cohesion were easily reversed when project participants were exposed to a negative climate shock, in the form of a category 3 cyclone that partially destroyed houses and crops. Despite the program's beneficiaries demonstrating financial resilience in the aftermath of the shock, most hard-earned gains in social cohesion were wiped out for those who experienced a slight threat to their financial security.