The AGRUMIG project will aim to ensure that new understandings and knowledge from a spectrum of cases in Asia, Africa and Europe contribute to building effective migration-related governance and policy. The project will show that a new ‘positive migration’ approach can generate development benefits. In the period up to July 2020 the groundwork toward this was laid with an initial Brussels-based expert policy meeting that set out some of the broad governance challenges, some of the gaps in policy knowledge and major assumptions underlying current migration policy. It initiated a network of policy contacts which has been further developed by partners in the focus countries who have organised national and local level policy discussions on these issues in preparation for the next phase of the project during which policy working groups and communities of practice will be formed at country level to work with the research findings.
The halting of the field research in early 2020 due to the global pandemic has delayed the progress of the qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) - the innovative method that will be used to analyse the AGRUMIG data - as it requires complete data sets. However in some countries data collection has resumed and the QCA aspect has been re-scheduled. It is expected that the AGRUMIG project will potentially have impact in the following areas:
1. EU and global migration governance programming, policy making and actions will be better informed and have improved effectiveness.
2. Innovative and effective migration governance structures, policies and instruments within Europe, in the wider neighbourhood and in the global context are developed.
3. Indicators and assessment strategies are in place to measure the SDGs devoted to migration governance, and the performance of migration governance structures.
4. The reform process of the EU’s asylum regimes as well as the external dimension of EU migration policies are critically accompanied and appraised.
