The Governance of EU external migration and 'formal informality’

External migration has become a site for extensive EU activity, not least in the years following the migration ‘crisis’ in 2015-16. Migration has become a testing ground for forms of governance not generally associated with external relations, and in particular in the EU’s relations with countries who are in the enlargement (or pre-enlargement) process and the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). As such, migration figures strongly in the relationships between the EU and the non-Member State countries of Eastern Europe and the Middle East but in a highly differentiated way. The substance of relations between the EU and ENP states in the Middle East and North Africa does not fully depend on the existence of formal ‘legal’ agreements. The type of governance under analysis in this paper can be termed ‘formal informality’ as there is often the appearance of a (formal) EU agreement with a third country, but which lacks legal protections or transparency. Informality in governance is potentially problematic when used to bypass the substantive and procedural formalities associated with law, and in turn the protection of individual rights. This article uses the emergence and evolution of Mobility Partnerships between the EU and ENP countries in the Middle East and North Africa, and bespoke texts such as the EU-Jordan Compact as a prism to analyse what the moves towards informality mean for the governance of external migration. In doing so, the paper highlights the methodological challenges of tracking undefined tools and instruments that lack the kind of procedural safeguards as foreseen in the Treaty.