Contested conditionality in return and readmission: EU policy and the case of an EU+ state

For European states, the return of non-citizens without lawful residence is often understood as hampered by the non-collaboration of origin states outside of the continent. The fact that some destination states, such as Norway, engage in large-scale aid operations in the same origin states that they struggle to return to, has led some to speculate if development collaboration could somehow be leveraged to promote the collaboration of origin states on return and readmission. Others see the normative motivations of development collaboration as irreconcilable with the externalization of migration control. This raises two key questions that guide this paper. Firstly, are there reasons to strengthen collaboration across agencies and ministries in the respective fields of migration control and development aid, and if so, how and under which conditions? Second, are there ways for European destination states to meaningfully use development collaboration strategically in order to promote origin states’ ‘ownership’ of return? In pursuit of answers to these questions, the paper discusses the links between foreign policy and the normative motivations of development aid on the one hand and return and readmission policy on the other, with references to EU-wide policy developments as well as national policies and strategic thinking in Norway, an EU+ state. Norway is a country with a long tradition of investing generously in development collaboration and a long history of investing strategically in an effective return policy, making it an interesting case for exploring the possible nexus between the two. Drawing on the literature on aid conditionality, the paper offers a conceptual and stylized overview of how aid and return can overlap in different ways, and tentatively sketches out some conceptual criteria for distinguishing between productive and unproductive approaches to aid conditionality in return and readmission policy. The paper concludes that both the urge for some kind of aid conditionality and the supply of aid arise from the presence of multiple actors involved, in host and origin states alike, with only partly overlapping interests, and that this has thorny implications for European policy makers. The analysis builds on an extensive empirical base, including key national and EU policy documents, participant observation at two national workshops and one high-level EU workshop in Norway, and 27 in-depth interviews with decision-makers, practitioners and experts across Europe. The latter, conducted for a commissioned study, are classified and cannot be cited here but offer valuable contextual knowledge.