Measuring Good Migration Governance with an Indicator Approach
ADMIGOV Deliverable 7.4 (2023)
The AdMiGov indicators offer policy makers, academics, and other interested stakeholders an innovative and evidence-based tool to measure and assess good migration governance. The origin of the indicators takes root in the call for safer, sustainable, and more effective migration governance raised by the international community, and shaped in the 2016 New York Declaration, the 2018 Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, and the Global Compact on Refugees, along with Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals.
The novelty of AdMiGov indicators is twofold. Firstly, it makes international standards - and particularly the underlying principles of protection and sustainable development - the core benchmark against which national migration governance systems are evaluated. Secondly, it moves beyond a traditional focus on policies on paper, to also evaluate the implementation of migration governance, including, for instance, the use of resources and data, the kinds of actors involved in border practices, and the presence of administrative barriers.
The AdMiGov indicators build upon and complement existing knowledge in the field of migration policy indicators (e.g., MGI, MIPEX) and have been informed by empirical insights from the AdMiGov fieldwork. Indicator construction followed a holistic approach to migration governance, examining its main areas (entry, exit, temporary and circular mobility), elements (actions, actors and resources) and stages (formulation, promulgation, implementation and evaluation).
The result is a set of 68 indicators that can be applied to evaluate national migration governance systems, allowing its users to assess a country’s alignment with international standards on protection and sustainable development, to identify areas in need of development and to identify potential best practices.
Beyond constructing the tool, as initially envisaged, the report also presents preliminary insights into how the indicators can be applied by drawing on data concerning the Netherlands, Spain, and Turkey, where the original set of indicators was piloted.