Regions and global migration governance: perspectives ‘from above’, ‘from below’ and ‘from beyond’

ABSTRACT

Although receiving increasing attention in multilateral settings, regional arrangements play a hitherto under-investigated role in global migration governance. Regional initiatives exist for intraregional mobility; migrant rights; refugee protection; or to counter unsolicited migration. Often, these initiatives have developed in different institutional settings and with little coordination. This article theorises the drivers of regional migration governance as well as the interplay between regional processes and global ones. In doing so, we highlight the complex interplay between intergovernmental dynamics ‘from above’ and transnational processes ‘from below’ as well as external forces ‘from beyond’, in particular the external influence of other powerful states and international organisations. This theoretical framework provides the basis for a comparative and comprehensive analysis of the determinants of regional approaches in the wider context of global migration governance.

International migration has developed from a primarily domestic concern to a key focus of global governance efforts. Regions have advanced to becoming important players in these endeavours. This is acknowledged in the United Nation's Global Compact on Refugees and the Global Compact for Safe, Regular and Orderly Migration adopted in December 2018. In an effort to foster international cooperation, the compacts refer to regions as laboratories for pursuing agreed objectives such as promoting legal pathways for migration, improving migrant rights, or protecting refugees. However – what constitutes a region, what the relevant institutions are, let alone what defines a regional system of migration governance is far from clear and has been deliberately left open in the two compacts (Lavenex 2020, 686). To shed light on this regional dimension of migration governance and to elucidate its constitutive drivers at the level of intergovernmental and societal dynamics is the first aim of this Special Issue. The second aim is to put regional dynamics in context and to examine the connections between regions and global factors.

While global initiatives tend to assume regional institutions to constitute an autonomous source of governance, we know relatively little about the division of labour between regional arrangements and overarching institutions; the public and private dynamics sustaining regional initiatives from ‘above’ and from ‘below’; and the relationship between local ownership and external influences. The advent of regionalism more broadly and of regional migration governance more specifically have been met with a surge of scholarly attention to the topic. Most analyses of regional migration governance tend to focus either, from a legal and/or political science perspective, on formal intergovernmental institutions or they analyse, from a sociological perspective, the societal dynamics in regional processes. Importantly, regional approaches tend to be examined in isolation from each other and often through individual case studies. This not only omits an overarching comparative assessment of migration governance ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, including its interplay. It also omits the link to a separate strand of literature that deals with the migration diplomacy of powerful states and international organisations that may influence regional initiatives ‘from beyond’.

Gathering an interdisciplinary group of legal scholars, political scientists and sociologists with expertise in different world regions, this Special Issue seeks to advance our conceptual and empirical understanding of regional migration governance at the nexus of internal and external, political and societal, formal and informal dynamics. This introductory review paper sets out the overarching analytical framework by conceptualising regional migration governance along three interplays and corresponding research questions guiding the contributions to the Special Issue:

1. Multi-level interplay: What is the ‘governance space’ for migration governance in regional level institutions as compared to the multilateral and national levels? Which aspects of migration governance are covered (mobility, human rights, protection, trafficking, control) and how do these approaches relate to national/multilateral ones?

2. Public-private interplay: How far are public regional migration governance initiatives ‘from above’ sustained/contested/complemented/substituted by private governance initiatives ‘from below’ and vice-versa?

3. External-internal interplay: How do external actors and transregional/transnational governance shape regional approaches ‘from beyond"? Do international actors and policies support or rather disrupt regional/local governance ‘from above’ and ‘from below"?

After corroborating these research gaps in the extant literature, we first define the notion of regional governance before introducing the three analytical lenses structuring the individual contributions to this Special Issue. These are (a) the fragmented and contested level of the state apparatus and international institutions acting ‘from above’; (b) civil society mobilisation campaigning and promoting governance ‘from below’ and (c) transregional power dynamics flowing ‘from beyond’ the regions from powerful states and related organisations in the moulding of regionalism.

Insights and omissions in the study of regional migration governance

The heightened political attention given to regional institutions in migration governance, broadly defined as institutionalised form of policy-making by public and private actors, is paralleled in a surge of scholarship on the topic. Although comparative analyses are still few, the emerging literature highlights the variation and fragmentation of regional approaches. Generally speaking, this research falls into two broad groups: more legal and political science oriented approaches that look at mainly inter-state, intergovernmental processes and formalised institutional dynamics on the one hand; and more sociologically driven approaches that focus on the role of non-state and civil society actors, in addition to informal relations, on the other hand. In the first perspective, analyses have compared the proliferation of free movement regimes attached to regional integration frameworks (Acosta and Geddes 2014; Lavenex et al. 2016; Nita et al. 2017) and the advent of regional refugee regimes (Mathew and Harley 2016). Taking a more interpretative approach, and based on case studies from different world regions, Geddes et al. (2019) and (Geddes 2021) stress the diversity of understandings and representations of the causes and effects of migration. Linking up with the institutionalist literature on regime complexity, Lavenex (2018a, 2018b) retraces the often separate and un-coordinated institutionalisation of free movement, migration control, refugee and migrant rights policies in different world regions, and assesses them comparatively in terms of scope, legalisation, and integration. Overall, existing research of the first grouping has tended to confine global and regional governance to spaces of state interaction.

While lawyers and political scientists have generally placed their focus on formal organisations, treaties and regulations addressing migration as the outcome of interaction between states, a different perspective is proposed by sociologists and other scholars interested in the role of non-state actors in influencing migration policy, the process and manner of governing. This perspective is crucial in order to understand the intricate and at times less visible dynamics of policy making (and its politics) in regional settings. A sole or narrow concentration on the formal intergovernmental structures can also be misleading as many studies underline important gaps between the official commitments (‘on paper’) and their implementation on the ground (‘in practice’). Research of migration governance ‘from below’ in contrast underlines the contributions made by civil society actors including trade unions, and their transnational networks in providing regional responses both in the absence of or in interaction with state-led initiatives (Grugel and Piper 2007; Piper 2015). Next to grasping the effects of migration governance on the ground, as experienced by those governed but often not governing, these perspectives also address the contested nature of regulations over human mobility and highlight the plurality of visions and challenges implied in developing regional frameworks for facilitating mobility, promoting migrants’ rights and protecting refugees whilst preventing irregular migration.

While scholars and UN architects have acknowledged the importance of regional structures as pillars of migration governance in their own right, the question how regional developments are interconnected with one another and what role external actors play in the development and shape of regional approaches should not be neglected. The steep intensification of so-called external migration and refugee policies by Western countries impacting on countries of origin and transit of migrants and refugees has raised considerable scholarly attention (for recent comparative accounts see e.g. FitzGerald 2019; Moreno Lax 2017; Stock, Üstübici, and Schultz 2019). The example of the European Union's external migration policy with its numerous ramifications into regional processes is a case in point (see, e.g. Betts 2011; Carrera, Vara, and Strik 2019; Lavenex 2006). Yet this burgeoning literature rarely addresses the impact of these policies on regional migration policies and institutions abroad, nor the ways in which regional policies and institutions affect the conduct of transregional externalisation policies. A few studies have addressed the role of international organisations, partly as agents of state donors, in promoting regional approaches. For instance, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), for instance, is the main sponsor behind the web of Regional Consultation Processes (RCPs) that have been established across the globe from the 1990s onwards and tend to focus on migration management (Thouez and Channac 2006; Koehler 2011). The UNHCR enters this sphere in relation to the development of regional responses to refugee flows and the implementation of so-called Regional Protection Programmes, frequently, like for the case of the RCPs, with substantial funding from the European Union (Lavenex 2016b). Together with the bilateral foreign policies of other influential countries, regional approaches are, therefore, very much subject to external influences, hence posing the question of ‘ownership’ over regional initiatives (Korneev 2018).

Regions and regionalism in governance

Notwithstanding more than six decades of research on regional integration and regionalism, the notion of ‘region’ remains a polysemous concept (Lombaerde et al. 2010, 736). In this paper and Special Issue we focus on regions as institutional arrangements that develop common policies on international migration across several territorial jurisdictions within a more or less clearly defined and more or less contiguous geographic space.

The growing importance of regions as spaces of migration governance is a product of state-led purposeful political action, an outcome of migration flows and of mobilisation by private actors (Lavenex and Piper 2019). In this Special Issue, we conceptualise regionalism from an encompassing perspective in order to address both intergovernmental migration governance ‘from above’, that is through the interaction of states in more or less formalised institutional settings, and societal migration governance ‘from below’, that is through the activities of private actors, at times in partnership with state or intergovernmental actors. This perspective acknowledges that the proliferation of regional treaties, declarations and processes dealing with migration (Lavenex 2018a) develops in the context of important intra-regional (also at times referred to as ‘South-South’) migration flows (Hujo and Piper 2010). According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) (2009, 2), ‘(a)mong people who move across national borders, just over a third moved from a developing to a developed country’, leading to the observation that around 30 per cent of global migrants move within regions. According to UNDESA, in 2020, ‘nearly half of all international migrants resided in the region from which they originated’ (2020, 2).

Herewith we draw on the distinction in the literature between more formal ‘regionalism’ as political institution-building and ‘regionalisation’ as transnational societal process (Hettne and Söderbaum 2000; Hurrell 2005). The contributions in this special issue show that top-down and bottom-up dynamics are deeply intertwined in the development of regional migration governance, and that it is the interaction between the two that determines the form and the scope that migration governance takes in different regions. Put differently, this approach addresses the dynamic and procedural character of regional migration governance beyond the static form of formal institutions. In doing so, we present a multi-actor model of governance highlighting the multiplicity of organisations involved and thus different ways of interpreting what governance actually comprises. Our aim thereby is to arrive at a more accurate characterisation of not only the variety of governance forms we find in different regions but also of its multi-dimensional and multi-directional nature by demonstrating the very political nature of ‘the governance project’ (Dingwerth and Pattberg 2006; Grugel and Piper 2007).

The development of a regional layer of governance comes in multiple forms, some of which are more linked to formal cooperation between governments, others which develop through the interaction between societal actors, and still others which derive from the interaction between the two. This distinction has been introduced by Hettne and Söderbaum (2000), who distinguish regionalism as a political product of mainly state actors within a geographic region and as a societal process resulting from wider, and partly exogenous, processes of global transformation. Reviewing the phenomenon and the study of regionalism from the point of view of international relations theory, Hurrell (2005, 42) made a similar point when stating that ‘regionalism needs to be understood as a multidimensional and multilevel process, which is not based solely on or around states, but reflects the activities of states, firms and social groups and networks. Regionalism needs to be viewed as taking place within a range of arenas, involving a heterogeneous set of actors, acting both ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, tying together material factors and ideas and identities’.

State-centred accounts tend to portray regional institution building as intentional response by governments to transnational challenges and collective action problems. There is a tendency to conceptualise political choices as rational response to objective underlying problems. Standard rational-institutionalist approaches to international cooperation also tend to focus on formal governance arrangements to which governments abide, that is collective treaties and declarations which they adopt in their interaction (Hurrell 2005, 46). This perspective has traditionally not questioned states’ capacity to address societal challenges domestically and to enter into meaningful international cooperation. It is only in recent years that also mainstream IR scholars have become more interested in the question of ‘limited statehood’ and of the limits to states’ capacity to provide governance services (e.g. Draude, Börzel, and Risse 2018; Lavenex 2018b).

A more complex view on regionalism highlights dynamics and structures below and beyond the state that are equally important for understanding regional governance: ‘This account stresses the pluralism of the norm-creating processes; the role of private market actors and civil society groups in articulating values which are then assimilated in inter-state institutions; and the increased range of informal, yet norm-governed, governance mechanisms often built around complex regional networks, both transnational and trans-governmental’ (Hurrell 2005, 47).

This multilevel and multidirectional perspective on statist governance ‘from above’ and societal dynamics ‘from below’ is particularly fruitful from a comparative point of view as it brings out differences in the extent of state governance vis-à-vis the role of societal actors in different parts of the world. For instance, we may expect that in regions with dominant authoritarian statehood the role of regional transnational actors will be relatively limited, such as for instance in the Gulf States and semi-authoritarian countries like Singapore. Conversely, weak statehood, that is states with relatively low degrees of administrative capacity and weakly developed presence in migration governance, may correlate with stronger societal mobilisation and with private actors stepping into a governance void. The case studies in this Special Issue give some support to this interplay: we find a particularly strong role of civil society engagement in regions where intergovernmental arrangements and also domestic migration policies and institutions are not strongly developed, such as in Asia (Piper and Rother in 2022, this issue), and regions where ambitious intergovernmental arrangements meet on relatively weak domestic governance structures, such as West Africa (Bisong 2022, this issue). In contrast, the role of civil society is less prominent in regions with authoritarian regimes such as Eurasia (Korneev and Leonov 2022, this issue) and, partly, the Middle East (Fakhoury 2022, this issue). History, type and volume of immigration and emigration may also explain vibrancy of civil society engagement. For instance, large volumes of emigration have sometimes spurred bottom-up mobilisation for a rights-based approach to migration, such as in the Philippines (Chavez and Piper 2015).

Such multilevel and multidirectional perspective opens up additional lines of inquiry to that preoccupied with multilateral coordination and cooperation between states to inspect global and regional processes from the viewpoint of diverging perspectives and interests, treating ‘governance’ as a ‘political project’ (Dingwerth and Pattberg 2006) rather than functional structure and its institutions as ‘spaces of contestation’ (Grugel and Piper 2011).

Summing up, we propose an analytical framework for studying regional migration governance that centrs on the interplays between governance levels – focusing on the relationship between regions, multilateral and national institutions; agents – including both state and non-state actors; and dynamics – accounting for both internal and external drivers, formal and informal processes. In the remainder of this article we introduce each of these interplays in more details, summarising the main insights from the contributions to this special issue, before we draw some overarching conclusions.

Regional governance from a multilevel perspective: fragmentation and disconnect

Migration governance today refers to a plurality of issues that are guided by different dynamics, reflecting distinct constellations of interests and interdependence and mobilising diverse actors and institutions. While this plurality is already characteristic of national migration policies, it is even more pronounced when we move to the regional and international levels of governance (Lavenex 2018a; Lavenex and Lahav 2012).

Broadly speaking, in the international realm migration governance has materialised along both protective (migrant rights enhancing) and protectionist (access-reducing) policies, involving different types of actors and institutions with different priorities. This fragmentation is reflected in the separation of human rights, refugee protection, (labour) mobility, and migration control instruments in pertinent administrative portfolios, legislative frameworks and policy initiatives. This disconnection plays out differently at the various levels of governance depending on the types and constellations of actors, norms, institutions and preferences.

Whereas international frameworks have traditionally focused on the human rights and refugee aspects, many regions have developed – next to and frequently disconnected from regional human rights and refugee instruments – policies liberalising intra-regional mobility and, increasingly, measures to counter irregular immigration from third countries. Historically, most international organisations dealing with migration today have regional roots (see Karatani 2005, for a detailed account). While it took several decades until refugee policy instruments diffused to other regions, the first element of migration governance spreading across world regions were human rights treaties (Lavenex 2018a). Although not specific to migrants, these contain important entitlements applying to non-nationals.

The next wave of regional initiatives were economic integration efforts providing for the mobility of workers and other citizens (Martin 2011; Russo 2010). Cooperation on refugee protection intensified especially since the 1980s, leading to the diffusion of both formal, legally binding regional conventions and informal processes. Since the 1990s, new regional cooperation initiatives through so-called Regional Consultation Processes (RCPs) have taken a securitarian focus and have concentrated on the fight against human trafficking and smuggling as well as the control of irregular migration. While this agenda has become particularly prominent in the European Union, it has spread globally via RCPs. These informal intergovernmental networks have emerged largely detached from other regional migration institutions (such as e.g. ASEAN) and are under stronger influence of powerful countries of destination either within or outside the region. This is evident from the leading role in RCPs by the IOM which is a projectised organisation receiving much of its funding from the EU (Geiger and Pecould 2020). Although all these initiatives are summarised under the heading of ‘top-down’, that is state-led governance, important differences exist in their degree of formalisation, in the legal nature of their provisions, the existence or not of enforcement procedures, or their embedment in wider political settings with institutionalised decision-making procedures (see Lavenex 2018a).

Among the different institutional settings, regional integration projects involving common legislative bodies and implementation/enforcement procedures constitute the more developed settings of ‘top-down’ regionalism. The European Union stands out for the supranational features of its constitutional design and legal order, which constitute a layer of top-down’ regionalism above the otherwise prevailing forms of intergovernmental cooperation. With the centralisation of intra-European migration policy cooperation in the EU, a substantial shift has occurred from the human rights orientation of the pre-dating Council of Europe and its Human Rights Convention to questions of economic mobility and, from the mid-1980s onward, the concerted fight against irregular migration and the development of a common asylum policy. The human rights focus of the early years was maintained through the parallel constitutionalisation of human rights in European countries and re-emerged in the context of more economically oriented cooperation in the European Union with the expansion of social, economic and political rights for intra-EU migrants, culminating in the idea of an EU citizenship in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. In contrast to this liberal, rights-based internal mobility agenda, regional cooperation on immigration from third country nationals has been dominated by a restrictive attitude. While EU countries have maintained their national immigration policies, they have sought cooperation at the regional level in particular to rescue control over the irregular entry of third-country nationals after the decision to abolish internal border controls in the EU. The EU is, therefore, indicative of the dialectic dynamics of intra-regional opening and inter-regional closure in the process of state-led regional integration. This focus has gone along with the development of an ambitious external migration policy agenda which today constitutes an important external influence on regionalisation processes involving countries that are seen as potential sending and transit countries of migrants heading towards Europe (see below).

Another region that has developed quite ambitious migration policies is Western Africa. The African Union has adopted the vision of a pan-African free movement zone, which draws on sub-regional integration efforts within Regional Economic Communities (RECs). One of the most developed is the Economic Community of West African States ECOWAS. As in most African sub-regions, this official agenda responds to existing transnational ties between ethnic groups and traditional nomadic migration patterns ‘from below’ characteristic of the pre-colonial era. Already its founding Treaty of Lagos (1975) provided for freedom of movement (Deacon et al. 2011; Adepoju 2011). Cross-border transit was facilitated through a common identity travel card introduced in 1987 and the ECOWAS passport (IOM 2007). In 1993, the General Convention on Social Security was adopted to ensure equal treatment of cross-border workers. Africa is the only region with South America where a majority of states are party to the UN Migrant Workers Convention. In institutional terms, all 15 ECOWAS members have ratified the 1979 Free Movement Protocol, which becomes directly applicable in national law. The ECOWAS Court of Justice has juridical power to enforce compliance with the Revised Treaty and all other subsidiary legal instruments adopted by Community and it has issued several rulings concerning the implementation of the freedom of movement (Open Society 2013). Nevertheless, numerous official and unofficial obstacles are reported that limit implementation in practice (Awumbila et al. 2014).

ECOWAS has also developed formal mechanisms in the field of refugee protection as part of its cooperation on peace and security (Lavenex 2018a, 12f). Herewith, ECOWAS as reacted to the deep-seated problem of refugees as a consequence of recurrent violent conflict in the region. This cooperation is based on the Refugee Convention of the Organisation of African Unity OAU adopted in 1969. Pan-African commitment to asylum was reiterated in the African (Banjul) Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights of 1981 and its adjacent Commission and Court have developed an active jurisprudence in the matter (Sharpe 2013). Both the intra-regional mobility and refugee protection are official agendas which have been supported by societal dynamics ‘from below’, as shown in the contribution by Amanda Bisong (2022, this issue). Cooperation on the control of migratory flows in Africa in contrast responds to external influence ‘from above’ – in particular sponsored by the EU (see below)

The region in which cooperation ‘from above’ is least formalised but more subjected to contestation is Asia (see Moretti 2022, this issue; Chavez 2015). When it comes to regional economic integration, the 1967 founding document of the Association of South East Asian Nations ASEAN did not touch on migration. Limited provisions on labour mobility were included in its 1995 Framework Agreement on Services (AFAS), later recapitulated in the 2012 Agreement on Movement of Natural Persons. These provisions are linked to investment and business flows to facilitate the temporary movement of highly skilled professionals and are backed by a number of Mutual Recognition Arrangements. Yet ASEAN provisions touch only a very small fraction of the wide mainly informal migration movements in the region, and implementation has remained poor (Jurje and Lavenex 2018). This concurs with the ‘ASEAN way’, an explicitly non-legalistic, voluntarist mode of governance preferred by Southeast Asian nations (Acharya 2017).

Next to this limited mobility agenda, in 2007 ASEAN leaders also adopted the Declaration on ‘Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Migrant Workers’ (Rother and Piper 2015) – which, ten years later, was revamped into the 2017 ASEAN Consensus on The Protection and Promotion of The Rights of Migrant Workers. While the Declaration only contained general calls upon governments, the Consensus goes further as it foresees the elaboration of an action plan as well as state reporting on the consensus’ implementation and sharing of best practices. This represents a departure from the general absence of monitoring mechanisms in ASEAN (Nikomborirak et al. 2013) and is linked to both activism on the part of the Philippine's government and intensive lobbying by migrant groups ‘from below’ (Chavez and Piper 2015; and see below). Yet it should be noted that the Consensus only applies to legally resident migrant workers, it is thus much more limited than the 1990 UN Migrant Workers Convention – and it does not cover the majority of (irregular) migrants in the region (Piper and Iredale 2003).

ASEAN countries’ reluctance towards international legal commitments is mirrored in their abstention from international instruments. Out of the ASEAN members, only Indonesia and the Philippines are parties to the 1990 UN Migrant Workers Convention. As shown in Moretti's contribution to this Special Issue, Asian countries have remained even more disengaged from international refugee law which translates into lacking policy in this domain The only relevant regional initiative are the Principles of Bangkok on the Status and Treatment of Refugees adopted in 1966, with a final version adopted in 2001¹, which are declaratory and non-binding and, unlike the Cartagena Declaration in Latin America, have not been incorporated in national legislation and practices (Moretti 2016). According to Moretti (2022, this issue and forthcoming) Asian countries’ reluctance to join the Refugee Convention was mainly due to its content (which attributes the responsibility to the country of origin and lacks binding burden-sharing agreements); the fear that the accession would create a pull factor; and the non-legalistic approach.

There are indications, however, that this disengagement might be changing, partly due to developments at the national level in Indonesia and Thailand (Moretti 2022, this issue). At the regional level, however, refugee issues are most likely to remain outside the Bali Process mainly because of Australia and its offshore processing, but also due to the imminence of refugee displacements. Heavily focused on anti-trafficking and the fight against irregular migration, and dominated by Australia, the Bali-Process has from 2012 only very timidly addressed refugee issues (Mathew and Harley 2016, 52; Moretti 2022, this issue).

Summing up, regional migration governance ‘from above’ has seen a considerable expansion over the last decades across continents. In all regions, the diffusion of human rights instruments emulating international treaties – including pertinent migration norms – has preceded cooperation on migration proper. The first regional migration-specific institutions were regional mobility regimes, liberalising cross-border movements either only for (specific) classes of workers or regional citizens at large. In Africa countries have responded to endemic flows of migrants, including also forced displacement and refugees through regional cooperation. Given the weakness of enforcement mechanisms and ambiguous political will, however, these formally impressive initiatives have not always materialised in practice, pointing at the need to match governance ‘from above’ with demand and support ‘from below’. This disconnection between governments’ formal discourse and decisions on the one hand, and practical action on the other hand, is even stronger in the Asian region, even though Asian countries have kept a low profile in regional cooperation generally and on migration in particular. Although the migrant rights agenda has had support ‘from below’, especially strongly in Asia, and free movement regimes have been established to re-install traditional mobility patterns that had been cut off by national borders, we can conclude that the regional formalisation of free movement and migrant rights regimes ‘from above’ displays elements of isomorphism and emulation whereby formal commitments have remained to a certain degree loosely coupled with political practice (Meyer and Rowan 1977). Distinct political dynamics are at play in the most recent regional initiatives which focus on migration management, regional refugee protection and control. This agenda has been much more in the focus of powerful countries either in the region or in the neighbourhood – which points at the importance of feeding in the influence of external actors in the study of regional migration governance (see below).

Intergovernmental cooperation and transnational contestation: migration governance ‘from below’

Given the very political nature of the ‘governance project’, the intergovernmental interaction outlined above provides a powerful context for the mobilisation from below by private actors which potentially also shape such interactions. This section focuses on a specific type of civil society actors, that is rights advocates and migrant associations.

Since the regional level of governance is still less well studied, it is primarily global governance scholars who have taken an increasing interest in the (potential and actual) role of non-state actors (Joensson and Tallberg 2010) and civil society organisations in governing projects (Raustiala 2002; Reimann 2006). They have especially done so in relation to balancing the otherwise lamented ‘democratic deficit’ of global governing institutions (Scholte 2011) and the steady weakening of rights frameworks (Grugel and Piper 2007). Applied to the subject of migration, few studies (e.g. Chavez 2015; Rother and Piper 2015; Grugel and Piper 2007; Delgado Wise 2018) have to date analysed migration governance from the viewpoint of civil society and its role in influencing the direction of multilateral policy making from the perspective of migrants, that is from the ‘bottom up’.

It is in particular in regard to the advancement and promotion of a ‘social change’ agenda that certain civil society actors – rights advocates, migrant associations and labour unions – play a key role and often the key role (Diani 2003). Since regional economic integration is often accompanied by overseas direct investment, labour market restructuring and changing ‘supply and demand’ dynamics driving regional migratory movements, foreign migrant workers typically end up in precarious employment situations compounded by legal insecurity (Piper, Rosewarne, and Withers 2017).

Our bottom-up perspective highlights the production of a migrant-centric narrative, based upon notions of justice, fairness and equality, derived from the experience of being a migrant, in contrast to the state-dominated efforts which aim at a unified, ‘managerial’ approach to migration policy through global organisations and regional bodies or processes (Piper 2013). Including a bottom-up perspective into our analysis allows us to assess the way in which, despite claims to the contrary, global migration is subject to politics and its governance a political project. This is all the more critical, since an understanding of global and regional migration governance as a ‘space of contestation’ in turn lays conceptual groundwork for the study and analysis of the relationship between developments at the multilateral, inter-state level in relation to transnational societal processes, including the struggles by migrant-led organisations.

The promotion of a rights-based approach to migration by the fledgling global migrant rights movement, the Global Coalition on Migration (www.gcmigration.org), composed of regional networks of migrant rights and grassroots organisations, exemplifies one such struggle. Its purpose is to counter the economic or security-based approaches prioritised by states, in the form of an alternative vision based on a human rights approach. The main members of this global movement, regional networks from around the world, were partly the product of global opportunity structures provided by the gradual institutionalisation of global migration governance (such as PANiDMR in Africa, founded in 2010); others gained further strength from such global developments (e.g. the well-established Migrant Forum in Asia, or MFA, which has existed since 1990 and constitutes the largest regional CSO network in terms of membership, scope and geographic coverage, see Piper and Rother 2022, this issue).

The role of those regional networks has been two-fold: 1. to feed regional specificities into the advocacy efforts of the combined global migrant rights movement. In doing so, regional networks bring the voices of ‘their’ migrant constituencies, and thus region-specific concerns, to the multilateral level, and thus to the attention of global actors and the state community, reinforced on the basis of critical mass gained by their participation in the global migrant rights movement; and 2. to capitalise on the ‘global boomerang effect’ (Rother and Piper 2015) by bringing region-specific issues to the attention of international organisations which are expected to influence regional governing institutions and processes accordingly. This strategy is used because direct engagement with regional organisational bodies has generally proven difficult in Asia, Latin America and Africa, given the ‘lack of social dialogue and participation in regional migration consultation processes’ (ILO 2017).

In her detailed analysis of transnational mobilisation in the ECOWAS region, Amanda Bisong (2022, this issue) shows that regional migration governance ‘from below’ contributes to reinforcing regional policies, diffusing policies across countries in the region, and also to circumventing restrictive national agendas through adopting innovative regional approaches. In sum, she concludes that this migration governance ‘from below’ contributes to strengthening the institutional framework for regional migration governance in West Africa.

Asia is home to vibrant civil society space engaged in migrant rights activism. In addition to the aforementioned MFA, there are smaller networks such as CARAM Asia, APRRN, and the Task Force on ASEAN Migrant Workers but the MFA has the best developed strategies along the national-regional-global continuum. Furthermore, there are sub-regional trade union councils (ASETUC, SARTUC, IDWF-Asia²). MFA and the trade union networks call for regional trade policies to suspend trade benefits which are detrimental to worker rights’ violations. Another key demand relates to RCPs such as the Colombo Process and Abu Dhabi Dialogue: the need to re-design them as platforms for monitoring progress and sanctioning member states for failure/non-action to implement the Global Compact on Migration. Furthermore, MFA has formalised the Asian Inter-Parliamentary Caucus on Labour Migration committed to pursuing common activities that go beyond annual information exchanges, aimed to achieving concrete rights protection for migrant workers and their families. They advocate against temporary contract migration – the dominant legal pathway in Asia – by demanding status regularisation and abolition of ‘employer tied’ work permits.

The contributions in this issue that look at regional migration governance ‘from below’ in Africa (Bisong 2022, this issue) and Asia (Piper and Rother 2022, this issue) corroborate the finding that CSOs activism has been anchoring human rights as a ‘common and powerful’ discourse (Jochnick 1999) by developing their own interpretations. Their success can be attributed to their adoption of a networked approach to enhance their effectiveness and level of influence (Piper, Rosewarne, and Withers 2017); their willingness and ability to engage in norms-making and norm socialisation instead of resorting to coercion (Keck and Sikkink 1998). This regional engagement reflects civil society engagement in global campaigns relating to migrant rights, such as for the ratification of the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (Simeone and Piper 2018), and the ILO Convention 189 on Decent Work For Domestic Workers whose success is also largely attributed to the combined efforts by unions and migrant rights organisations globally (Fish 2017).

Thus, there a definitive and observable trend that civil society actors now enjoy a greater level of access to international organisations (Joensson and Tallberg 2010), including migrant rights organisations (Piper 2015). In slight contrast, the case of ECOWAS analysed by Amanda Bisong in this Special Issue and the ‘nodal governance’ identified by Nicola Piper and Stefan Rother in the case of civil society engagement in Asia indicate that although access to formal regional institutions is emerging, compared to UN organisations it is still limited. Of prime importance, therefore, are regional networks’ operations on the global level. The process in relation to the Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration is one such example where an intertwining between regional and global levels has occurred. Regional consultations have allowed civil society to bring specific issues to the attention of regional IOs and their governments which were in turn taken to the global level (UN headquarters in New York and Geneva).

Internal versus external dynamics: shaping regional approaches ‘from beyond’

Whereas the advent of regional approaches to migration governance deserves attention in its own right, the preceding sections have already indicated that taking place in the broader context of international relations, the regional proliferation of policies, institutions and initiatives addressing different aspects of international migration is not void of external influences, power relations and legal hierarchies. Regional cooperation does not take place in isolation – regions may learn from each other and engage in processes of policy or norm diffusion and emulation (Börzel and Risse 2012). Powerful regions and states may, sometimes also via international organisations, also intentionally project certain policies, instruments and approaches towards other regions. The can occur bilaterally when these measures target individual countries or the policy transfer can also directly address regional institutions. This points at the need to incorporate external influences ‘from beyond’ in the study of regional processes and institutions, and their interplay with internal, home-grown dynamics.

As previously noted the EU has been particularly active at developing a regional migration policy with an explicit external dimension, and it is this external dimension that has developed most dynamically over the last decade (Lavenex 2006; Carrera, Vara, and Strik 2019). Under its ‘Global Approach to Migration and Mobility’ and the more recent ‘Partnership Framework’ and ‘Migration Pact’ the EU has put the focus on the fight against irregular migration and engaged into the promotion of border management, migration control and readmission cooperation with all its Eastern and Southern neighbours and gradually also countries further afield, with a focus on Sub-Sahara Africa. Policy instruments comprise both bilateral ones like cooperation and association agreements, readmission agreements or mobility partnerships and dialogues and also plurilateral ones targeted at particular regions, including cooperation with overarching regional institutions such as Regional Economic Communities in Africa or the dialogue set in place with the ASEAN countries in the framework of the Asia-Europe Meetings ASEM (Lavenex 2016a). Frequently, this policy – outreach involves the commissioning of international organisations such as the IOM or the UNHCR. The EU is today the main donor behind the promotion of Regional Consultation Processes and Regional Protection Programmes with a focus on Africa and, more recently, the Middle East which are implemented by the IOM and UNHCR respectively (Lavenex 2016b).

The trend towards regionalising its external migration policies has been pursued with the more recent EU Trust Funds for Syria and Africa, the Facility for Refugees in Turkey and the Response Plans adopted in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis analysed by Fakhoury (2022) and Spijkerboer (2022) in this special issue. Their detailed analyses are salient instances of the attempt to fostering regional responses from beyond – and of the difficulties involved in promoting regionalism in the absence of regionalisation. In contrast to the Middle East, where external influences meet on an absence of home-grown regionalism, in Africa external migration policies meet on a strong record of regional approaches. While RCPs have proliferated across Africa, the ECOWAS countries are unique in having incorporated the previously separate Migration Dialogue for Western Africa MIDWA in the ECOWAS structures (ECOWAS 2012; Bisong 2022, this issue). Another region in which external sponsors – in particular the EU – have sought to exercise important influence is Eurasia. As shown by Korneev and Leonov (2022, this issue), the home-grown mobility agenda among the countries of the foreign Soviet Union has thus been supplemented by an externally – induced agenda focused in migration management, leading to a contested and fragmented tapestry of regional migration governance.

The phenomenon of external regional migration governance ‘from beyond’ is however not limited to the EU and its external relations. Wealthy countries of destination have a long track-record in extending migration control policies beyond their borders (FitzGerald 2019), and in particular in their regional spheres of influence. Thus, the US have been particularly active in Central and Southern America, also via the Puebla RCP (Kunz 2011), whereas Australia has developed a similarly vast-ranging web of bilateral and regional policies towards South-East Asia and further afield, also by sponsoring and financing Regional Consultations with in the so-called Bali Process (Moretti 2022, this issue).

Conclusion

Although regions have only recently been ‘discovered’ by migration scholars interested in the institutionalisation of migration policy, they have historically existed for a long time and also influenced the way in which global migration governance has been shaped up over the last decades. Regional dialogue and consultations were after all a vital part in the establishment of today's global migration institutions, such as the 1951 Geneva Convention and the predecessor of the IOM. And they were again at the heart of the workings of the Global Commission on International Migration which operated between 2003 and 2005. The papers in this Special Issue advance the study and our understanding of regional migration governance in at least three main respects. Firstly, rather than studying regional processes and institutions in isolation, they highlight the multi-actor, multi-directional and multi-level character of migration governance at the nexus of the interactions between governments (‘from above’), civil society (‘from below’) and external actors (‘from beyond’). What emerges is a story of a multi-directional relationship between the ‘global’ and the ‘regional’ embedded in specific institutional histories and migration contexts (e.g. regional migration corridors). Regional realities and priorities have fed into global level processes, and global regulation and knowledge, next to self-interested states and their groupings, have had purchase within regions. But regional migration governance is also a ‘stand-alone’ process in its own right with its institutional and political complexity in regard to dealing with the phenomenon of cross border migration that often takes on different dynamics when taking place between countries of greater geographic and cultural proximity.

We hope this Special Issue will inspire future research on this subject matter from a variety of perspectives (e.g. a postcolonial lens) and methodologies. The intricate histories to the genesis and mutual influence between the two levels (global, regional) alone deserve being subject to future lines of inquiries, as do the complex relationships between regions. In any case, our studies show that in order to understand the emergence, substance and failures of regional migration governance, it is necessary to look beyond formal intergovernmental agreements and bring civil society and external influences in. Suffice to say, in the absence of multilateral responses to the various challenges of migration governance, regions and attempts at regional solutions are here to stay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The organization is behind this initiative was the Asian-African Legal Consultative Committee (AALCC), which became the Asian-African Legal Consultative Organization (AALCO) in 2001.

2 The fully spelled out names of these organisations are: Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN), ASEAN Services Employees Trade Union Council (ASETUC), South Asian Regional Trade Union Council (SARTUC) and the International Domestic Worker Federation (IDWF).