¿How To Assess Good Migration Governance? An Indicator-Based Approach From The ADMIGOV Project.

To what extent do current migration governance systems ensure the protection of migrants and refugees? How far is migration governance consistent with sustainable development objectives? What are their main strengths and weaknesses? To what extent are they able to bring into practice what they are committed to on paper? How can we move forward to implement a more secure, more sustainable, and more efficient migration governance? These are some of the questions that inspired the construction of AdMiGov indicators, a novel and comprehensive set of synthetic measures that evaluate a country’s migration governance. The AdMiGov indicators offer academics and other interested stakeholders an innovative and evidence-based tool to measure and assess good migration governance. The origin of the indicators takes root in the call for safer, sustainable, and more effective migration governance raised by the international community, and shaped in the 2016 New York Declaration, the 2018 Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, and the Global Compact on Refugees, along with Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals. The novelty of AdMiGov indicators is twofold. Firstly, it makes international standards - and particularly the underlying principles of protection and sustainable development - the core benchmark against which national migration governance is evaluated. Secondly, it moves beyond a traditional and narrow focus on policies on paper, to approach migration governance in its whole complexity, evaluating some of its crucial factors that are often overlooked (e.g. the use of resources and data, the kinds of actors involved in border practices, and the presence of administrative barriers). More precisely, the set of 68 indicators evaluate a country’s migration governance across four dimensions: 1) areas of functioning (entry, exit, and temporary, and circular migration); 2) stages of governance (formulation, promulgation, implementation, and evaluation); 3) elements of governance (actors, relations, resources, and actions); and 4) migrant-policy categories (the various groups targeted by governance systems). The AdMiGov indicators build upon and complement existing knowledge in the field of migration policy indicators (e.g., MGI, MIPEX) and have been informed by empirical insights from the AdMiGov H2020 AdMiGov project: “Advancing Alternative Migration Governance” (GA: 822625). This paper, on the one hand, illustrates the methodology through whihc AdMiGov indicators have been constructed and, on the other, it presents the preliminary insights gathered from the pilot of the indicators in three countries: the Netherlands, Spain and Turkey.