Transferring cooperation mechanisms to trigger policy diffusion: a multi-scale approach to international institutions promoting a governance for migration.

Based on the literature on international regimes and the literature on policy diffusion, this paper examines and compares how international institutions such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Labour Office (ILO) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) generate and promote new forms of cooperation for policy diffusion from the international to the regional level. It analyses how this diffusion process is designed to enhance a convergence in actors'' expectations and practices. This convergence at the regional level leading, then, to new approaches of cooperation at the global level. This empirical study analyses these new patterns of policy diffusion by examining institutional settings and networks. It explains how actors'' perceptions and policies tend to be shared and converge through their participation in regional processes of cooperation promoted by international organizations. Innovative rules of cooperation as well as enhanced teaching/learning processes lead to the transfer of ideas and of a common language from the international to the regional level of cooperation in the field of migration management. The paper unfolds in three parts: first, an analyse of the reasons why IOs initiated this transfer to the regional level; second, how this transfer gets organized; and third, how, in turn, this transfer affects cooperation and reform processes at the global level – i.e. how the "senders" are themselves affected by the transfer and the policy diffusion process they initiated and promoted.