Conceptualizing a Policy Innovation: Resilience in European Migration Governance

Resilience has become a new buzzword in the European Union's external governance approach and is currently being probed for migration governance, too. The EU global strategy is dotted with 'resilience', a concept borrowed from the context of food crises in Africa and expanded towards the EU's external relations. The High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini, envisages that a resilience paradigm can entice a "more effective migration policy" (2016: 27f). Most policy analytical efforts to understand and assess the rise of the resilience paradigm have been restricted to the developmental aspects of the global strategy. Migration scholars are yet to keep track of a pending resilience turn. While the EU is already detailing the concept in documents and mainstreams it as a research program for the migration domain, there is little scholarly consideration of what resilience may mean for migration governance. A stock taking of the wider social sciences literature on resilience, and a review of its application by the EU and international organizations in migration governance and external relations management, enables us to reflect upon the innovative potential of resilience in migration policy making. Depending on how resilience is defined and applied, it can serve as a seemingly neutral indicator for assessing crisis response or feature as a new policy paradigm that re-orients policy and policy discourse. Detailing the conceptual foundations of resilience allows us to inform an ongoing political and academic debate about the development of a post-crisis EU border and migration governance.