Multilayered Migration Governance

The Promise of Partnership

Rahel Kunz, Sandra Lavenex, Marion Panizzon

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136804168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Multilayered Migration Governance explores the emerging concept of 'migration partnerships' in political management and governance of international migration flows. The partnership approach to migration seeks to balance responsibility and benefits of migration more evenly between source, transit and destination countries.

Case studies from the US, Europe and Africa analyse the various initiatives and programmes applied in national, regional and transcontinental migration policy today. It shows that a multilayered system of migration governance has emerged which embeds primarily bilateral and mainly control-focused migration partnerships in a broader framework of (trans-)regional and international cooperation providing key links to policy areas in development, trade, finance and security.

Utilising a comparative approach to assess the impact of partnerships on global migration policies, the book will be of interests to scholars and students in migration and development studies and international relations more broadly.

Part I

Global perspectives

1 The global governance of migration and the role of trans-regionalism

Alexander Betts

Introduction

The international institutional framework that regulates states’ responses to migration is of a fundamentally different type from the UN-based multilateralism that emerged to regulate other international issues in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Although international migration is not new, it has only relatively recently been recognized as a significant global issue that requires a debate on the role of international cooperation (Betts 2011; Ghosh 1999; Hansen 2008; Koslowksi 2009; Martin and Martin 2006). The quantitative growth in international migration has contributed to migration becoming an increasingly politicized and visible issue. Meanwhile, the qualitative change in the nature of migration, with increasing south–south movements and the internationalization of labour markets, has led states to seek cooperative ways to maximize the economic benefits of migration, while minimizing the costs associated with undesirable migration. As with other trans-boundary issue areas, states have increasingly recognized that they are unable to address their concerns with migration in isolation but that forms of collaboration and coordination are necessary.

Yet, with the notable exception of the refugee regime, there is no formal or comprehensive multilateral regime regulating how states can and should respond to the movement of people across national borders, and no overarching UN organization monitoring states’ compliance with norms and rules. The majority of the formal rules that do exist in relation to migration pre-date the Second World War. The long-standing passport regime, treaties on labour rights, and the basis of the refugee regime all emerge from the inter-war years, and most subsequent formal multilateralism has merely supplemented or updated these institutions. Attempts to develop new formalized cooperation mechanisms in the post-Cold War era have been very limited and have generally failed. The limited ratification of the Treaty on the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families and the degree of inter-state polarization over the UN High-Level Dialogue on Migration and Development and the Global Forum on Migration and Development’s (GFMD) relationship to the UN system, highlights the degree of opposition to formal multilateralism.

The limited extent of formalized cooperation is partly attributable to the fact that the issue’s growth in political prominence has coincided with an era in which states’ support for formal multilateralism (in the sense of inclusive, binding treaties overseen by international secretariats) is generally in decline. However, this alone provides an insufficient explanation for the limited degree of formal cooperation, which is also attributable to some of the characteristics of the issue area. Unlike many other issue areas such as climate change mitigation or the development of a vaccine for a global pandemic, neither migration nor global migration governance represent global public goods for which the benefits are non-excludable and non-rival (Barrett 2007; Kaul et al. 1999). Migration itself is a private good for which the main costs and benefits accrue to the sending and receiving states and the migrant. Meanwhile the benefits of global migration governance – orderliness and predictability – may be non-rivalrous in the sense that they are undiminished by another state’s consumption but are unlikely to be non-excludable. Much of global migration governance is therefore better conceived as a ‘club good’ for which the benefits of its existence may well be non-rival but can be excluded from states. This means that states do not require all-inclusive, binding multilateral cooperation in order to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of mobility, but can instead often revert to more exclusive bilateral, regional, and inter-regional ‘clubs’.

Furthermore, the international politics of most areas of migration is characterized by a fundamental power asymmetry, generally between migrant sending and receiving states. In the absence of a binding, institutional framework, receiving states have discretion to open or close their borders and are thus implicit ‘rule-makers’, while sending states have to generally accept the decisions of receiving states and are thus implicit ‘rule-takers’. This generally means that unilateralism is in the interests of the powerful, receiving states, while multilateralism is in the interests of the weaker, sending states. This representation of the international politics of migration plays out at both the global and the regional level and serves as an obstacle to formalized cooperation. At the global level, voting patterns at the UN on, for example, the GFMD have polarized along north–south lines in accordance with whether states have been predominantly sending or receiving states. On a regional level, it is often the more powerful, receiving states that shun binding cooperation. As long as it remains in the perceived interests of the powerful states to avoid binding rules and to retain discretion, the power asymmetry inherent to the politics of migration will represent a major barrier to formalized, multilateral cooperation.

Yet even though there is no formal, coherent multilateral UN-based governance framework, this is not to say that there has been no global migration governance. In reality there is a rich and fragmented tapestry of global migration governance, much of which has emerged in a historically ad hoc way. It exists at a number of levels. On a first level, there is a thin and incoherent layer of formal multilateralism that builds upon the inter-war years framework in areas such as the refugee regime, ILO conventions, and norms underpinning the use of passports. At a second level, there are a range of international agreements that have emerged to regulate other issue areas – WTO law, maritime law, human rights law, and humanitarian law, for example – which although not explicitly labelled as migration, have implications for how states can and do respond to human mobility. This ‘embedded’ governance has contributed to a range of international organizations and other actors becoming actively engaged in debates on migration insofar as it touches upon a broader set of mandates. At a third level, as political concern with labour migration and irregular migration has increased, new mechanisms of global migration governance have emerged that are exclusive rather than inclusive (in the sense that they involve a limited group of states and are based on closed membership) and can be subsumed under the notion of ‘trans-regionalism’. Trans-regional governance can be defined as sets of formal and informal institutions that cut across and connect different geographical regions. It is not reducible to ‘inter-regionalism’ insofar as it need not necessarily involve an inclusive dialogue between representatives of different regions. Instead, it may involve both inclusive and exclusive structures linking regions through a combination of regional, inter-regional, and bilateral norms and forums. The concept builds upon ideas relating to external network governance developed particularly in the work of others (Lavenex and Wichmann 2009; Lavenex 2008).

It is at this third level that global migration governance is developing most rapidly. A cross-cutting layer of bilateral, regional, and inter-regional cooperation has emerged. Northern, migrant receiving states are attempting to develop the means to control and manage migration within and from southern regions of origin. The bilateral Migration Partnerships explored in this volume (see Kunz, Panizzon, and Lavenex and Stucky in this volume) are but one aspect of the set of governance mechanisms through which northern states are attempting to develop trans-regional authority over migration, and they need to be seen in this larger context. While individual European states are trying to develop partnerships and the EU as a whole is developing a ‘Global Approach to Migration’, this chapter argues that these trends are part of a wider pattern of ‘trans-regional governance’ as a means by which northern states increasingly attempt to control and manage irregular migration. This chapter therefore focuses mainly on this level of global migration governance.

The chapter is divided into three main parts. First, it outlines the different levels of global migration governance. Second, it explains the emergence of trans-regional governance in relation to migration. Third, it looks empirically at trans-regional migration governance in the context of EU–African relations by looking comparatively at the development of Europe’s trans-regional authority over migration policy in the East African Community (EAC), Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), and Southern African Development Community (SADC) regions.

Three levels of global migration governance

It has become increasingly common to argue that there is no or limited global migration governance. While it may be true to suggest that global migration governance within a formal multilateral and UN context remains limited, and that progress on the ‘migration and development’ debate within the UN has been limited, this is not a basis on which to claim that there is no global migration governance. It is simply of a different and – arguably – more complex type than many issue areas in which more neatly compartmentalized regimes emerged in the post-Second World War context. Indeed, it is possible to conceive of global migration governance as existing at three principal levels.

Inter-war multilateralism

Unlike many other trans-boundary issue areas such as trade or the environment, migration lacks a coherent, UN-based multilateral framework. It was not an area that developed strong institutionalized cooperation in the post-Second World War era when many other regimes were emerging. This was because, at the time, there was no demand for such a regime. However, subsequently the power relations between migrant ‘receiving’ and migrant ‘sending’ states have meant that receiving states with greater power have sought to retain discretion over their own migration policies rather than engage in formalized institutional cooperation.

Although formal multilateral cooperation on migration through the UN is limited, the issue area nevertheless does have elements of institutionalized multilateral cooperation. Koslowski (2009), for example, divides the global governance of migration into three broad ‘global mobility regimes’: the refugee, international travel, and labour migration regimes. He suggests that the former has the most developed multilateralism, the latter the least, with travel somewhere in between. In many ways, however, each of these regimes does provide a layer of multilateral global migration governance, primarily based on the legacy of cooperation developed in the inter-war years.

The global refugee regime, based on the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the role of UNHCR, is arguably the strongest form of formalized cooperation on migration (Loescher 2001; Loescher et al. 2008). It is the only area of migration with a specialized UN agency and a near universally ratified treaty that constrains states’ sovereign discretion in their admissions policies. The international travel regime, insofar as it is a regime, has developed a number of forms of multilateral coordination. The passport regime, in particular, relies upon large-scale multilateral cooperation. Over time, cooperation on technical standards relating to travel document security has become ever more complex. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has played an increasingly important role in setting standards (Koslowski 2010; Salter 2009). Finally, the labour migration regime, although extremely limited, is nevertheless underpinned by a range of labour standards developed through the ILO treaties (Kuptsch and Martin 2010).

What is notable about all three of these areas, though, is that while they have all developed and evolved over time, they have their origins in the formal multilateral cooperation that emerged during the inter-war years. The most prolific era of the ILO was prior to the Second World War, when it was one of the largest and most influential of international organizations. The basis of the passport regime – which underpins the entire notion of a travel regime – was established before the Second World War. The origins of the refugee regime can also be traced to the inter-war years and the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (LNHCR). New multilateral cooperation has built only incrementally on these long-standing agreements but in many ways has adapted conservatively. Even in the three global-mobility regimes, powerful states have rarely sought to delegate additional authority in the areas of migration to a binding, multilateral framework.

Embeddedness

The concept of ‘embeddedness’ is widely used in anthropology to refer to a situation where an area of social life does not exist as a recognized and compartmentalized area but is an integrated part of the larger social system. In many communities, anthropologists have argued that issue areas such as the ‘economy’ or ‘law’ do not exist as an explicitly identifiable or atomistic area of society but are instead an integrated part of a larger social structure (Sahlins 1974; Wilk 1996; Appadurai 1988). For example, when asked, people in a particular community within many societies may not be able to point to a particular area of social life called the ‘economy’ but it may instead be an integrated and implicit part of the community. The concept can be analogously applied to global governance to highlight situations in which there may be limited explicit governance in an issue area but in which that issue area is nevertheless implicitly regulated by institutions that were created to regulate other issue areas.

Much of global migration governance is not explicitly labelled as such but nevertheless regulates how states can and do behave in relation to migration. Much of global governance, in issue areas such as trade, security, and human rights, pre-dates the post-Cold War international focus on migration. Rather than arriving on the international scene with an institutional blank slate, debate on international migration takes place against the backdrop of the extensive pre-existing structures of global governance that have emerged since the Second World War. In contrast to 1945, when much of the existing UN-based multilateral...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• Introduction Governance through partnerships in international migration
• Part I Global perspectives
• Part II EU partnerships
• Part III Bilateral partnerships
• Index