Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DYNAMIG (How migration decisions are made: diverse aspirations, trajectories, and policy effects)
Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2023-12-31
The EU and its Member States pursue a wide range of policies that address migration, including development cooperation, border management, and legal labour market access. To be effective, policies must be based on an accurate understanding of how individuals decide whether to migrate. DYNAMIG will fill critical gaps in scientific and policymakers’ knowledge about how the decision-making behaviour of potential and actual migrants interacts with policies given micro, meso, and macro factors, e.g. different socioeconomic status. We focus on Africa as the most important future region of origin for migrants to Europe. We pursue a multi-disciplinary approach along four dimensions:
First, we extend existing conceptualisations of the dynamics of migration decisions along extended trajectories and test these through innovative methods, including digital diaries collected from migrants en route from Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, and Morocco to Europe.
Second, we develop a mobile-device-based tool for online choice experiments to causally study aspiration formation across different contexts and stages of migration with several tens of thousands of individuals in origin and transit countries.
Third, we study how policies affect migration decision-making with methods that allow causal interpretation: choice experiments with respondents in different contexts; a randomised controlled trial of an entrepreneurship training intervention in Senegal; and a quasi-experimental analysis of the EUTF for Africa.
Fourth, through interviews with high-level policymakers and textual analysis of policy documents, we analyse how the design of EU, Member State, and relevant African policies that address migration takes into account migrant decision-making. To maximise our impact on policymaking, we embed our research in an intentional process of joint knowledge creation with stakeholders in Europe and Africa, including the policymaking community, migrant and diaspora organisations, and civil society.
First, we extend existing conceptualisations of the dynamics of migration decisions along extended trajectories and test these through innovative methods, including digital diaries collected from migrants en route from Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, and Morocco to Europe.
Second, we develop a mobile-device-based tool for online choice experiments to causally study aspiration formation across different contexts and stages of migration with several tens of thousands of individuals in origin and transit countries.
Third, we study how policies affect migration decision-making with methods that allow causal interpretation: choice experiments with respondents in different contexts; a randomised controlled trial of an entrepreneurship training intervention in Senegal; and a quasi-experimental analysis of the EUTF for Africa.
Fourth, through interviews with high-level policymakers and textual analysis of policy documents, we analyse how the design of EU, Member State, and relevant African policies that address migration takes into account migrant decision-making. To maximise our impact on policymaking, we embed our research in an intentional process of joint knowledge creation with stakeholders in Europe and Africa, including the policymaking community, migrant and diaspora organisations, and civil society.
DYNAMIG initially involves extensive primary data collection, preceded by conceptual analysis, ethics approvals, pre-analysis plans, and practical preparations. By the end of the first reporting period (Month 12 for a 36-month project), two of our four core research work packages have begun collecting information while the other two are finalizing technical preparations and survey instruments.
At the end of the first reporting period (Month 12 for a 36-month project), DYNAMIG research is not yet sufficiently advanced to produce specific research findings. We expect to move beyond the state of the art by combining several elements in our approach that are crucial for a better understanding of future migration challenges: First, we focus on potential migrants in Africa because African countries already display diverse regional and international migratory patterns and because Africa is the world region with the fastest-growing population. That makes Africa central to migration-related concerns in the EU. Second, our team is highly interdisciplinary, comprising geographers, economists, sociologists, and political scientists, among others. Based on their wide range of disciplinary insights, they will bring innovative approaches to bear on our extensive data collection efforts. Third, we will emphasize the identification of causal relationships in our research designs and pay close attention to the external validity of our research with a view to deriving policy implications. Fourth, we will organize our research on the basis of open science practices; mainstream research ethics and gender concerns; and emphasize joint knowledge creation with stakeholders, including potential migrants and the policy-making community.