Migration and asylum is a contested policy issue. State representatives cannot agree on whether it is a humanitarian or a security problem. Mixed migration, the joint, unauthorized movement by migrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees, is particularly politicized. As a result, recent international instruments such as the Global Compact for Migration are vague and legally non-binding. Multilateral cooperation remains limited, despite rising numbers of people on the move. This also means that intergovernmental organizations and UN agencies such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have only limited mandates: they have limited formal means to deal with the complex challenges arising from large numbers of people irregularly crossing international borders to escape conflict, violence, hardship, and exploitation. Does this mean that international organizations cannot govern migration and asylum? In my new book, Global Governance on the Ground. Organizing Migration and Asylum at the Border (Oxford University Press, 2024), I show that while international actors lack comprehensive official competence, they still shape global migration and asylum politics – through their practice in the field.
Informal Decision-Making in the Field
In the book, I examine how the field staff of organizations like the UNHCR and the IOM, as well as the operational personnel of humanitarian NGOs and regional agencies, such as the European Coast and Border Guard Agency, Frontex, address migration and displacement on the ground. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the European external border in Greece during the “migration and refugee crisis” of 2015-16, I demonstrate that in contrast to negotiators in official policy arenas in New York, Washington, Geneva, Brussels, and Nairobi, field staff of international organizations are directly confronted with the exigencies of global migration and displacement. This makes it much harder to avoid making at least provisional decisions, the contestedness of the issue notwithstanding.
Field personnel, such as border guards, asylum case workers, protection officers, medical professionals, social workers, search and rescue professionals, camp managers, and logistics experts, make spontaneous decisions, improvising local policy solutions. These solutions have often not been foreseen in their organization’s task descriptions and official policy guidelines but result from on-the-ground processes of trial and error. Nonetheless, they reduce uncertainty, define shared goals, and coordinate behavior. They restrict and enable new courses of action for people on the move, thereby creating immediate regulative impacts on their lives. In other words, field staff govern migration and asylum at borders and similar operational sites.
Take the example of search and rescue, the spotting of boats in distress at sea and the safe disembarkation of all passengers. Without having been officially tasked to patrol the shore and assist migrant boats, volunteer lifesavers started to spontaneously organize search and rescue missions, as one of the rescue professionals recounted during my fieldwork: “That was all self-organized: Trial and error. At the end of the day, we were taking on a role that the coastguard should have been doing. [We] just kind of stepped into that role [and] have gained a huge amount of experience [because we] have taken on massive responsibilities and [were free not only to make our] own decisions but also to make mistakes and to learn from them.” Through learning-by-doing on the ground, fieldworkers developed detailed routines for patrolling the shore, spotting boats crossing from Turkey, going out at sea in their rescue boats to intercept them, steering them to safe landing sites, and assisting them in getting out of the water. Developing and performing these search and rescue practices affected the life choices of people on the move in a very straightforward way: Without helping them to land safely, many would have drowned.
During these street-level decision-making processes, field staff regularly interacted with colleagues from other organizations: they improvised across organizational boundaries. I have found this pattern with regard to a variety of practices, ranging from registration and camp management to asylum interviews, family reunification, and returns. Formal affiliations with the UNHCR, the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), the IOM, Frontex, and humanitarian NGOs did not prevent them from closely collaborating and competing to find provisional solutions to the challenges of mixed migration movements.
Training Field Staff to Consolidate and Diffuse Practical Knowledge
Improvised policy solutions often do not stay local. The operations and training officers in the headquarters of the organizations that operate in the field regularly debrief mission personnel to create and update training tools. They rely on their personal networks to translate operational knowledge from the bottom up. Headquarters staff do so because, in cases where formal policy instructions are scarce, experiential knowledge becomes a valuable resource: Interviewees underlined that they intend to “skill up” their organizations by learning from the field. Just like their colleagues who improvise on the ground, they work with what is available to them at a certain point in time. They create handbooks, best practice manuals, and other practical resources that fill gaps in mandates and formal policies.
International training and operations specialists not only clarify the meaning of existing legal and institutional frameworks. Instead, they build on in-the-field innovations and use training contexts to determine what the migration-asylum nexus means politically and how international actors need to deal with it. The training content becomes guidance as such, as one interview partner put it. Because official guidance and task instructions are lacking or incomprehensive, international bureaucrats consolidate local practices in order to know how to respond to continuous migration movements and to standardize street-level behavior.
How to Include Migrants and Refugees?
These informal ways of governing migration and asylum have important normative implications. If international organizations are creating informal, de facto policies from the field up, we need to think about how these can be legitimized. It is not difficult to think of cases where street-level bureaucrats have abused their discretionary powers or where local, harmful patterns of action became standardized within an organization. To mitigate these risks, we need institutional reforms such as the creation of an ombudsperson and individual complaints procedures that increase the accountability of global governance on the ground, especially towards its direct addressees such as migrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees.
When global issues are new, politicized, and crisis-ridden, they tend to remain under-regulated. Under-regulation is likely to breed informal governance. Given the ongoing crisis of multilateralism, we can thus expect an increase in informal governance forms such as the one I describe in the book. As observers of multilateralism in action, we should pay close attention to how fieldworkers address transnational challenges as they play out in everyday life at the frontlines of global governance, also beyond migration and asylum. Only then can we discuss how global governance might remain effective and legitimate.
About the Author
Nele Kortendiek is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute and Senior Researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt.
This think-piece is based on the author’s new book, Global Governance on the Ground. Organizing Migration and Asylum at the Border (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Photo credit: UNHCR 2020 Greece.