Beneficiary ownership: how migration and development programmes mislead to succeed 

Guest post by Christina Oelgemöller, Audrey Lenoël, and Richard Black. Christina is senior lecturer in International Relations at Loughborough University. Audrey is a postdoctoral researcher at Institut Convergences Migrations (French National Center for Scientific Research). Richard  is a geographer and Professor at the University of Liverpool. They share an interest in mobility and development, especially in West Africa. In recent years they were fortunate to work together with colleagues at West African universities and a few European universities to research questions of mobility in West Africa. This piece constitutes one of the outcomes of their wider collaboration. 

European countries spend billions of Euros each year in aid money trying to reduce or stop international migration from Africa. This includes well-publicised deterrence measures such as the detention of asylum-seekers in the Bibby Stockholm barge in southern England. Police, armed forces and coastguard surveillance of land and sea borders from the English Channel to the Mediterranean are also classified as ‘development aid’. So too is the sophisticated tracking of migrants across the Sahara and along other major routes designed to ‘stop people smuggling’ and the development of biometric databases within Africa. 

This burgeoning industry of border control labelled as aid spending has received considerable academic attention over recent years. Somewhat less attention has been paid to spending within migrants’ countries of origin on ‘migration and development’ programmes, which more obviously are ‘development aid’. Yet such programmes – promoted through mechanisms such as the European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF) – also act as a form of border control. Without directly criminalising cross-border movement, they seek to normalise a framing of migration as undesirable and unnecessary.  

We address this framing in our newly published article in the Geopolitics journal, focused on West Africa. In particular, we argue that the process of migration policy development in West Africa can be understood as a form of subjectional diplomacy. Although diplomatic, in that policy is formulated between diplomatic actors, it is subjectional, in that one side shapes the questions that are up for discussion, and so massively influences outcomes, ‘taking interventionist liberties’. 

Policy development on migration is framed in the language of ‘beneficiary ownership’, explicitly stressing the active participation and ultimate ownership of West African governments. By contrast, the role of European governments and international organisations like the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is played down.    

IOM in particular is positioned as a ‘lead agency’, but one that – together with ECOWAS – ‘supports’ West African governments to develop and implement their own national migration policies. This process is explained as ‘reciprocal’ – in line with IOM’s status as a diplomatic, but also 'technical’ organisation – promoting best practice that includes gender awareness, clear methodologies and ‘validation workshops’. This enables the circulation of knowledge in such a way that ‘superior’ European knowledge is not imposed starkly, but is nonetheless infused and as such determines what knowledge can be considered valid. It also elides over the issue of sovereignty, which otherwise might come to the fore in a process of national policy development. 

Within this scenario, although IOM eagerly positions itself as being ready to react to what governments – especially African governments – task it to do, in reality it has worked hard to establish a catalogue of potential interventions for at least two decades, since it established the ACP-EU Dialogue on Migration and Development in 2000.   

Interventions in this catalogue come in different forms. They include training ‘potential migrants’ (generally framed as anyone aged 18-30) so that they do not ‘need’ to migrate; supporting the ‘voluntary’ return of those who have migrated or tried to do so; strengthening migration secretariats within national governments with both personnel and systems that enable a clearer picture of who is migrating and where; through to policy development itself, which has strengthened border controls, codified relations between West African governments and developed potential interventions on gender and migration, climate change and migration, and more. 

All of this has helped establish a shared vocabulary that defines problems as well as suggesting solutions that can be addressed with IOM support. By influencing the way that migration is – and can be – talked about in such a comprehensive way, IOM is positioned as more than an important reference point. It also means that reciprocity is tokenistic at best, and knowledge management subjectional rather than co-produced. Other ways of seeing and acting become difficult, if not impossible.  IOM holds redemptive knowledge and is positioned in the same way that European actors have been positioned in Africa since colonial and missionary times. 

This form of subjectional rather than reciprocal diplomacy is reinforced by the sheer volume of activity that is funded and propagated by IOM. It has built relationships that ensure it is ‘invited’ to develop policy, guidance, action plans, even budgets. These relationships are facilitated by the creation of migration-expert positions within government which are funded and trained by IOM. Meanwhile the scope of this advice and activity widens to fields where IOM’s competence is not a given, but its presence is a convenience. For example, IOM supports elections, offers digital skills training to displaced people and has assembled wide-ranging datasets, none of which are immediately obvious activities for an organisation originally founded to ‘provide secure, reliable, flexible and cost-effective services for persons who require international migration assistance.’  

Interestingly, the language of ‘beneficiary ownership’ is not often used in print.  Rather, it is used informally in diplomatic and high-level programming circles.  The logic expressed, however, is woven throughout IOM’s day-to-day practice across West Africa.  National migration policies are framed as just that: within the power of national states to develop and change. 

Yet the notion of beneficiary ownership is misleading.  It is IOM that holds authoritative knowledge, which is shared in the contact zones of workshops, meetings and consultancies.  It has already defined the problem and now offers the solution.  Real ownership is retained by European governments who fund it. 

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