The relational dimension of decision-making process: how local civil servants follow suggestions.

Nowadays migration scholars are showing a growing interest in implementation practices. Researchers point out that migration officers adopt coping strategies to face their working conditions that, in turn, redefine migration policy. But migration policies are increasingly complex and implemented by a wide range of actors. This article aims to complexify the picture by examining relations between various actors and how these matters. In this respect, Belgium and reforms aiming at curbing marriage migration is an interesting case-study: civil registrars in municipalities have to control and celebrate marriages, and the federal administration (Office des étrangers) has to provide useful information to the former. Less is known about these exchanges and their impact on the decision-making process of civil registrars. We will explore this issue by focusing on the role of the “bureau recherche”, the service at the federal level that digs into migrant’s history and stresses “suspicious elements” and how it affects municipal civil servants’ practices. To do so, we did a multi-site ethnography in two local municipalities (from March 2014 to July 2015) and in the federal administration (from September 2015 to March 2016). We will highlight that the migration officers of the “bureau recherche” provide critical information to municipal civil servants that matter in their decision-making process and that shape their understandings of “fraudulent marriages”. Thus, the implementation of the fight against marriage of convenience cannot be understood without taking into account relations between the federal and the local administrations.