We provide a new representation of a refinable shift invariant space with a compactly supported generator, in terms of functions with a special property of homogeneity. In particular, these functions include all the homogeneous polynomials that are reproducible by the generator, which links this representation to the accuracy of the space. We completely characterize the class of homogeneous functions in the space and show that they can reproduce the generator. As a result we conclude that the homogeneous functions can be constructed from the vectors associated to the spectrum of the scale matrix (a finite square matrix with entries from the mask of the generator). Furthermore, we prove that the kernel of the transition operator has the same dimension as the kernel of this finite matrix. This relation provides an easy test for the linear independence of the integer translates of the generator. This could be potentially useful in applications to approximation theory, wavelet theory and sampling.