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Global Governance in Tough Times: Crisis Narratives, Governance Transformability, and Contemporary European Asylum Governance

Governance
Institutions
International Relations
Asylum
Philip M. Tantow
Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena
Philip M. Tantow
Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena

Abstract

"We are at present largely no longer enforcing #Dublin procedures for Syrian citizens." With this tweet on 25 August 2015, the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees acknowledged the European asylum crisis narrative, one month after Hungary had announced that it would no longer adhere to the Dublin Regulation, the centerpiece of European asylum governance, due to an influx in asylum applications. As the crisis narrative intensified, it spawned a wide array of government responses, including the reintroduction of border controls within the Schengen Area, emergency relocation schemes from Italy and Greece, the EU-Turkey joint action plan, and a Dublin Regulation recast proposal. Within the sphere of civil society, the crisis narrative inspired numerous projects assisting asylum-seekers on the one hand and criminal endeavors in human trafficking on the other. The formal architecture of European asylum governance, however, remains unchanged and in force three years later. When defining governance as a continuous process that develops over time and considering the notion that crisis narratives potentially affect agenda-setting thus facilitating reform, the case of contemporary European asylum governance revives questions into the evolving nature of global governance: How does governance beyond the state evolve during crisis narratives? In how far do crisis narratives serve as a transformative momentum? And how can established International Relations theories help explain the versatile development of global governance? This paper addresses these questions by introducing an original framework for the analysis of variation in governance beyond the state across issue areas. It serves as a starting point for a research project that employs a comparative case studies design to describe and explain the evolution of global governance during crisis narratives. Competing hypotheses are deduced from Neo-Institutionalism, Constructivism, and historical materialist approaches in critical theory, and utilized for the analysis of variation in global governance along several dimensions including the level of formal institutionalization, inclusiveness of decision-making, and effectiveness. Finally, the framework is applied to the case of contemporary European asylum governance, yielding early insights into Global Governance in Tough Times.