Migration, Civil Society and Global Governance

Abstract

The current special issue examines the development of an emerging global governance on migration and the spaces, roles, strategies and alliancemaking of a composite transnational civil society engaged in issues of rights and the protection of migrants and their families. This question is connected with how different actors – the United Nations, international organizations, governments and a wide variety of civil society organizations and regional and global trade unions – perceive the root causes of migration, global inequality and options for sustainable development. The contributions included in the special issue interrogate from different perspectives the positionality and capacity of civil society to influence the Global Forum for Migration and Development. They examine the opportunities and challenges faced by civil society in its endeavor to promote a rights-based approach within international and intergovernmental fora engaged in setting up a global compact for the management of migration and in other global policy spaces. A need for critical research The making of a de-commodifying, rights-based, global governance of migration is essential for the capacity to confront problems of unfree labor and the precarisation of livelihoods and citizenship. It concerns civil, social and labor rights for the protection of labor migrants, refugees and asylum seekers who constitute the most disadvantaged in many societies of both the global North and South. Their marginal representation calls for research on civil society in the global governance of migration and in other global policy spaces related to migration. Following several international conferences and reports, the United Nations (UN) initiated a High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development (UN-HLD) in 2006. And, in 2007, various governments launched the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD). The GFMD was designed as a state-led, nonbinding and informal process, but figures as the most comprehensive arena for continuous intergovernmental deliberations between sending, receiving and transit states on emerging standards for the global governance of migration. It is also informed by the exchange of ideas with a plethora of international organizations, multilateral global and regional bodies (e.g. the Global Migration Group, GMG), business actors and a broad civil society, This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. including migrant organizations, trade unions and non-governmental think-tanks. Given the growing relevance of migration in the international arena and the meagre results derived from the GFMD process to engender an institutional framework for the global governance of migration, in September 2016 the UN General Assembly endorsed the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants that set off an extensive intergovernmental consultation and negotiation process aimed at culminating with the adoption of a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Secure Migration by autumn-2018 (GCM). It is described as the ‘first, inter-governmentally negotiated agreement, prepared under the auspices of the UN, projected to cover all dimensions of international migration in a holistic and comprehensive manner’. Arrangements have been developed over the past years to include selected actors of civil society with the aim of instituting spaces for trust-building exchange between non-state and state actors. Since the inception of the GFMD, so-called ‘Civil Society Days’ (CSD) have been organized which precede the GFMD meetings. The CSD are currently managed by the Migration and Development Civil Society Network (MADE). A so-called ‘Common Space’, has been instituted as the interface between governments and civil society. Migrant and migrant advocacy actors in civil society have managed to continually expand their space for participation in these top-down processes while simultaneously establishing parallel events as autonomous spaces for deliberation and consensus-making between a multitude of variably positioned civil society organizations (transnational migrant organizations, trade unions, migrant advocacy civil society organizations (CSOs)); for example, the People’s Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA). Invigorated and informed by alternative political visions forged at the World Social Forum (WSF) and in global networks such as the food sovereignty movement, their aim has been to mainstream alternative development and globalization models by framing them in global contexts such as UN conferences on climate change, women’s rights, human rights, land rights and the ILO ‘Decent Work Agenda’ (DWA). Furthermore, they have established independent thematic chapters such as the World Social Forum onMigrations (WSFM) and civil society networks such as the Global Coalition on Migration. 10 Particularly, the Global Coalition is actively engaged in leading civil society and migrant organizations in the GCM towards its adoption by Member States in 2018. However, could the UN-initiated GFMD process indeed open the door for the representation of migrant civil society in, and impact on, a global governance of migration in transformation? This question is the focus of this special issue on Migration, Civil Society and Global Governance. The issue’s overall theoretical approach is aligned with approaches in international political economy (e.g. Birchfield, 1999; Cox, 1977; Gill, 2005), combining influences from Gramsci and Polanyi in bridging international relations and the national scale of analysis. Taken in its broadest sense, Polanyi’s notion of ‘counter-movement’ could be seen as an incipient theory of counter-hegemony. Today, as Gill (2003, p. 8) puts it: [W]e can relate the metaphor of the ‘double movement’ to those socio-political forces which wish to assert more democratic control over political life, and to harness the productive aspects of world society to achieve broad social purposes on an inclusionary basis. This approach harnesses the essence of Polanyi’s (1944/1957) theorem of the ‘double movement’, to a critical understanding of the present condition of globalization and its contestation, whether through policy regulation ‘from above’ (states and international organizations) or through civil society intervention ‘from below’. Based on these overall premises, the contributions of this issue set out, from different angles, to examine the development of an emerging global governance on migration and the spaces, roles, 4 MIGRATION, CIVIL SOCIETY AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE