Guidelines on Integrating Migration into Decentralised Cooperation: For Enhanced Migration Management for Local Development
Related Sustainable Development Goals and Global Compact for Migration Objectives
The UN Joint Migration and Development Initiative (JMDI) has published “Guidelines on Integrating Migration into Decentralised Cooperation”, which is a unique and unprecedented tool that walks interested local and regional authorities through the necessary steps to establish migration-related decentralised cooperation relationships. To do so, the guidelines first outline the added value of migration-related decentralised cooperation and then describe, with examples of good practices, how to harness the development potential of migration within such partnerships.
These steps are broken down into:
- What can be done at the institutional level to establish decentralised cooperation partnerships around migration;
- What kinds of joint actions and initiatives can be done at the sectoral level;
- What financial and human resources are needed and how to ensure these;
- How to tap into the potential of decentralised cooperation for knowledge sharing and capacity building;
- A set of overall recommendations.
This set of guidelines is of vital importance given that migration trends show that migrants from the same town or region in countries of origin tend to concentrate in the same territory or area in the host country, thus often creating distinct migratory channels between territories. Building decentralised cooperation relations between territories across such migratory channels is of strategic importance as it provides an excellent opportunity to promote shared prosperity between the territories concerned by building on the migrants’ transnational economic, social and cultural activities which are linking territories together. It is therefore important to enhance the general awareness of the key role of these local actors and to also empower them so that they are able to better harness the development potential of migration.