Navigating through an external agenda and internal preferences: the case of Ghana’s National Migration Policy

Abstract

In the context of international migration from African countries to Europe the EU widely applies the strategy of curbing irregular migration. EU efforts focus on combating the root causes of migration and flight and achieving African compliance on return and readmission. This approach ignores the interests of countries of origin. It also undermines what countries of origin do to deal with migration in their states. In West Africa, the regional organisation ECOWAS strongly promotes migration management, and introduced the 2008 ECOWAS Common Approach on Migration with guidelines for migration governance in the region. Ghana, as one of the first ECOWAS member states, adopted a National Migration Policy (NMP) in 2016. The country has a long migration history, has experienced different migration trends and is affected by various migration streams. As little is known about the country’s policy responses to migration management, this study investigates migration policy-making in Ghana. It specifically examines the case of the NMP for Ghana and aims at uncovering stakeholder involvement in the policy process as well as its determinants. Guided by an analytical framework derived from theoretical considerations of the advocacy coalition framework, the framework of institutions, actors and ideas and an extensive literature review, the study uses a qualitative approach. The results are based on 14 weeks of field research in Ghana in which 40 experts were interviewed. Together with an analysis of a plethora of secondary data the study finds that interests in the policy and the resources stakeholders possess, which then form the basis for their power, mainly account for stakeholders’ involvement in the policy process leading to the NMP for Ghana. The research further reveals that the NMP does not primarily respond to a perceived problem related to migration in Ghana: the internal migration flows from deprived to less deprived areas. Rather it largely pursues the interests of the EU, who is the main financer of the policy, to foster migration control. The results of the study therefore suggest that in the case of Ghana’s NMP internal interests were outweighed by the external agenda of the EU in the policy formulation process.