Refugee entrepreneurship within and beyond refugee camps: constrained and adaptive resourcefulness

Refugee camps represent some of the most adverse entrepreneurial environments, where legal restrictions, systemic exclusion, and chronic resource scarcity create formidable barriers to economic activity. Yet many refugees engage in entrepreneurial ventures, raising questions about how they navigate, adapt to, and reshape such constrained contexts. This study investigates refugee entrepreneurship in the Dzaleka refugee camp in Malawi, drawing on an embedded case study design. Our analysis develops a framework that conceptualizes refugee entrepreneurship as a dynamic process shaped by evolving constraints, temporally adaptive strategies, and multidimensional resourcefulness. We identify three interrelated dimensions of resourcefulness: material improvisation, cognitive adaptability, and relational strategy, whose salience shifts as entrepreneurs recalibrate their engagement with camp, host community, and transnational markets. By tracing these temporal trajectories, we show how refugee entrepreneurs exercise agency not as a fixed trait but as an evolving capacity expressed through cycles of embedding, dis-embedding, and re-embedding across relational and institutional contexts. We demonstrate how resourcefulness recursively reshapes the constraint environment, generating new risks and opportunities that necessitate continual adaptation. In this context resourcefulness becomes a dynamic enactment of agency and embeddedness a temporally contingent, actively managed resource.