Governing through incompletion: Diaspora-funded infrastructure and urban governance in South Lebanon

Urban reconstruction in conflict-affected regions is commonly understood through narratives of state failure, humanitarian substitution, or post-war planning. Less attention has been paid to how urban governance is exercised through infrastructures that remain neither fully completed nor entirely absent. Drawing on qualitative urban research conducted between 2022 and 2024, this study examines how diaspora-funded housing and collective facilities shape everyday urban governance in South Lebanon under conditions of partial and selective state planning. Based on urban ethnography, 17 semi-structured interviews, and a structured architectural survey across the city of Tyre and the towns of Jouwaya and Abbassieh, the analysis shows that diaspora-funded infrastructures do not simply compensate for gaps in public provision. Under conditions of fragmented responsibility, their material and operational incompletion can sustain a persistent mode of governance characterised by deferred functionality, moralised access, and dispersed accountability, through which authority, obligation, and responsibility are spatially organised. By conceptualising incompletion as an emergent governing relation rather than a transitional failure, the study contributes to debates on urban governance, infrastructure, and planning in post-conflict and diasporic contexts.