Venue-shopping and institutional fragmentation in international migration governance

Crises can strengthen the authority of existing institutions, but they can also cause new and competing institutions to emerge. This paper utilizes critical-juncture theory and historical institutionalism to present scope conditions for the emergence of new (and competing) venues in international migration governance. We present the end of the Cold War as a critical juncture which enabled a reconfiguration of the interests of central European states and a subsequent deterioration of existing normative and institutional regimes (the UNHCR), and the rise of alternative institutions, most notably the Intergovernmental Consultation on Migration (ICM) and the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD). Building on the notion of venue-shopping, we explain why we saw a regionalisation of migration governance in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The paper makes a novel contribution to the study of EU migration policy which has often been studied in isolation from the broader context of the complex and fragmented migration governance system. Furthermore, the paper presents new empirical evidence from UNHCR member state debates, and the hereto under-researched ICM and ICMPD.