Migration policy needs to be owned by the broad range of policymakers that touch it in some way. This is as true for strategy development as it is for the formulation and delivery of individual policies.
There is no ideal organizational structure for managing migration – no one-size-fits-all approach – but there are some optimal arrangements. Each State will have different migration objectives and priorities, and therefore will require an organizational structure appropriate to its specific needs. The core issues of resources and policy capacity will also differ markedly; that being said, fragmentation and dysfunction in policymaking is a feature of even well-resourced States.
Some States have a lead agency or ministry for migration with focal points in other ministries that would be considered stakeholders to migration policy. Splitting the policy arm from the operational arm is another approach to the architecture, where policy is led from within the ministry but delivered by a separate agency. For example, Sweden’s Ministry of Justice is the lead for migration policy while the Swedish Migration Agency is the operational arm that considers applications from people who want to live in Sweden, visit the country, seek protection from persecution or be granted Swedish citizenship. For some States, migration policy can be anchored more closely to the foreign ministry because the focus is on nationals going abroad. For others, where the focus is incoming migration, it may be more closely aligned to the interior or justice ministry.
In each context, migration may well engage a range of actors at different levels of government, with whom there may be only occasional interaction. Well-considered architecture across national ministries can often be challenging enough but migration often involves other, subnational, jurisdictions which either play a part or lead in policy design and delivery. For example, in Canada, some authority for labour migration programmes is shared with its provinces, and in the United Kingdom integration as well as education and health are delivered at the local government level.
The concepts of horizontal and vertical coherence are relevant here. Horizontal coherence is needed across national government agencies to ensure consistency in how migration management is incorporated into relevant policy frameworks. Vertical coherence captures the need for cooperation and coordination in how policy frameworks are determined and delivered between national and subnational actors. The challenge is to achieve effective coordination and a shared understanding of the interrelationship of policies. The need to map government stakeholders early is critical. Drawing on the earlier examples, designers of a labour migration programme will not be serving the policy of economic growth if they do not have the required information on labour and skills gaps; an education ministry or local authority is not going to know that it needs a policy response for migrant children if it has no knowledge they will be coming.
Individual policymakers will not necessarily have the opportunity to direct the institutional architecture, that is, to determine where functions are distributed across ministries or departments and levels of government. But it will nonetheless be useful for them to understand how that architecture works and what mechanisms exist, and how they may assist in the development and implementation of policies. Such governance mechanisms do not necessarily require significant resources. See, for an example, the box on Kenya’s National Coordination Mechanism on Migration sponsorship, below in Stakeholder partnerships in policymaking, a whole-of-society approach.
