Reintegration Governance

The Reintegrate project will combine the fields of reintegration and migration governance to establish a new sub-field of reintegration governance (RG).

This project will develop a conceptual understanding of what is reintegration governance, its implementation and effectiveness and a new theoretical framework of how different forms of reintegration governance shape returnees reintegration outcomes across an in-depth comparative analysis of four different states: Ethiopia, Morocco, Nepal, and Serbia.

The project is rooted in the nexus between policies and migrants agency by using a trajectories approach and active navigators to illustrate the role that returnees play in their own reintegration outcomes. The project makes several original contributions.

First, this will be the first study that examines how reintegration is governed and will take a global approach to compare different regimes of RG.

Second, the project uses an original analytical and empirical approach to compare RG across four case study countries that are each selected to represent a different form of RG. Ethiopia represents origin country led RG wherein the state has a national reintegration proclamation.

Morocco represents supranational led RG characterized be an EU Readmission Agreement, IOM Assisted Voluntary Return Programmes (AVR), and a GIZ Migration Advisory Centre. Serbia represents high RG including both supranational and origin country led RG. Nepal represents low RG wherein only an IOM AVR programme is operational.

Third, the reintegrate project addresses a gap in migration governance by bringing in the trajectories and navigation of returnees as a critical dimension in the analysis.

The reintegrate project will have an impact on migration studies, human geography and political science through the establishment of the new sub-field of reintegration governance.