A Participatory Turn in Migration Governance? Access to International Organisations for People with Lived Experience of Migration

Although scholars agree that migration governance is among the hardest policy areas to access for civil society actors, we see variation in the extent to which international organisations (IOs) involve people with lived experience of migration and their organisations (PLEs) in their policy processes, especially in recent years. For example, while since 2020 UNHCR has allocated resources to boosting PLEs’ engagement and the European Commission has created an advisory group made of PLEs only, IOM has remained rather closed to PLEs and civil society in general at the headquarters level. Given the important implications for questions of democratic legitimacy in migration governance, this paper asks why, how, and under what conditions IOs grant PLEs access to their policy processes. The paper addresses this question by drawing on IR theories of institutional design and using a mixed-method research design, based on data from interviews and publicly available documents. First, it develops an index that captures the openness of IOs to civil society, and PLEs in particular, and explores patterns across multiple dimensions. It then zooms into three cases studies – the European Commission, UNHCR, and IOM – to understand the motivations for (not) engaging with PLEs. Tentative findings suggest that the socialisation of some officials into norms of participatory policymaking is the primary reason for PLEs’ unprecedented access to IOs in more politicised policy areas, whereas functional demand is at play in less politicised areas and at the stages of policy formulation and implementation. Overall, the paper proposes a theoretical framework to study the inclusion of affected communities in policymaking, and it contributes novel empirical material to understand the role of migrants and their organisations in the policy process.