The crisis of migration : a policy crisis?

Abstract

This paper addresses the gap between policy development theory and practice by attempting to analyse and explain the humanitarian crisis of migration across the Mediterranean through a policy crisis. It posits migration as a ‘wicked problem’ which cannot simply be addressed through the traditional linear policy cycle model, which infers a direct link between policy and practice, where policy outcomes directly result from policy objectives. Through a critical appraisal of the policy development process, the paper examines the processes through which the traditional positivist theoretical model of policy development and its claims of effectiveness, efficiency, feasibility, transparency, and evidence-based rationality are despoiled by a policy crisis for the humanitarian migration crisis. This policy crisis is simultaneously characteristic of and characterised by a problematic problem definition, a dichotomy between policy and implementation, and inauthentic evidence-based practice. It is manifested by piecemeal crisis intervention, policy contradictions, and processes of both politicisation and depoliticisation, which compound the migration crisis on both the micro-individual and macro-structural level. This policy crisis underpinned by fragmentation, incongruencies and contradictions suggests more than just a discrepancy between theory and practice, demanding a critical examination of the problem and solution, a re-evaluation of the policy cycle model with its claims of objectivity, cognisance of vested interests, and subversion of the neoliberal agenda which puts profit before people and the economy over well-being and fundamental rights and freedoms. It also demands reappropriation of the theoretical, administrative, yet intrinsically political nature of policymaking in the acknowledgement that only genuine political commitment can offer a glimpse of hope for addressing the humanitarian crisis of migration by closing the gap between policy and practice.