The Governance of Cross Sectoral Policies

Territorialisation and sectorialization were two trends that followed each other. Nowadays, both these trends are simultaneously fostered. Thus, more cross-sectoral policies were developed. Aiming at addressing complex societal issues that tackle several issues, they question the way policy fields relate to one another, and hence addresses the issue of vertical coordination. Migrants’ professional integration policies fit in this issue. Indeed, immigration policies and employment policies traditionally depend on two different policy fields, and came to increasingly interact. Researches that have tackled cross-sectoral issues have rarely highlighted this crossroad of fields. However, we argue that analysing policy fields’ coordination is highly relevant to understand the way societal issues are dealt with, and hence cross sectoral public policies. How do we analyse the way fields’ boundaries meet, and policies that stem from this interaction? Addressing such issue through public policies analysis leads to focusing on vertical governance schemes that include both policymaking and implementation. Within this general analytical framework, an analysis of each field’s paradigm, instruments and actors will then help distinguish the impact of one field on the other. Finally, an analysis of these components within the cross-sectoral space will enlighten boundaries and intersections. In the case of migrants’ professional integration policies, this framework revealed different cognitive and instrumental components from one field to another. Caught between two different cognitive and instrumental frameworks, this cross-sectoral space encounters many obstacles to set up a clear policy, and therefore challenges coordination. Strategies are set up to go beyond this impediment, such as the use of other categories (youth, women, etc.), or the use of other policy fields (urban policies, etc.). This paper will present methodological insights to understand the stakes of cross-sectoral policies, and results based on empirical work on migrants’ professional integration policies governance schemes.