Migration Policies beyond Discretionary Power: Towards a Relational Approach of Implementation Studies

This Workshop aims to bring a relational approach to the study of the implementation of migration policies. In recent years, scholarship in migration studies has increasingly focused on implementation practices. Some scholars have engaged critically with the street-level bureaucracy approach (Lipsky 1980) focused on state actors (Infantino & Sredanovic 2022; Pratt & Sossin 2009; Jordan, Stråth & Tryandafillidou 2003), illustrating how discretionary practices do not merely arise from organisational constraints, but also from actors’ reactions to, and anticipations of, rules and of other actors, as well as emulation and mutual influence. They have shown, for example, how migration officers whose decisions are exposed to appeal procedures pay attention to and anticipate court rulings (Alpes & Spire 2014; Mascia 2021), how border guards partly act on the basis of trust of other instances of the network-border (Crosby & Rea 2016), or how visa officers from different countries informally learn from each other and share practices in what Infantino (2019) has called a ‘community of practice’. In short, they have shown how state practices are situated within a wider continuum of practices that influence each other, albeit indirectly and to different degrees. Hence, as argued by Darling (2022) discretionary power is structured by (and structures) power relations since it implies various forms of negotiations, and thus strategies, between multiple intervening actors with different degrees of power. Furthermore, a growing literature on non-state actors has illustrated how they too contribute (albeit to different degrees) to the final result of migration policies, and as such have to be considered implementing actors sensu lato. Infantino found that outsourcing parts of the migration policy implementation turns private actors into street-level organisations resulting in greater distance between applicant migrants and the final administrative decisions (Infantino 2016). Other scholars have looked at how the relation between private economic actors and policy-makers has led to the emergence of a migration industry (Gammeltoft-Hansen & Sørensen 2013; Anderssen 2016) and a market for border security (Baird 2018), which shape migration policies in practice. Next to economic actors, the literature has also pointed out the role of international organisations (Pécoud & Geiger 2011), NGOs (Lopez-Sala & Godeneau 2022), ordinary citizens (Lemaire 2021), as well as the migrants who are targeted by restrictive policies themselves (Darley 2009, Maâ 2022) in the facilitation or restriction of international migrations. Against this background, this Workshop proposes to investigate relational approaches to analyse the practices of implementing (state or non-state) actors and to engage critically with the notion of discretionary power. Although the literature has shown that migration policies are increasingly implemented by diverse actors, there has been little study of the relations between these actors. The Workshop intends to fill this gap.