INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION

Is the global governance of international migration feasible and and/or desirable?

Is the global governance of international migration feasible and and/or desirable?

Introduction

The question of governance has catapulted to prominence in recent years. A search of news databases for references to 'governance' shows the number of uses of the word has been on an upward trend through the late 1990s but has exploded during the past 12 months or so. However, the governance question arises in a number of different contexts: it is applied to corporations, governments and international agencies. The aim of this paper is to explore the links - if any - between corporate, public and global governance.

Global Governance

In each context the growth of interest stems from the sense that there has been a governance crisis. This is perhaps clearest in the case of corporate governance where the timing of the preoccupation with governance questions in public debate is related to a series of high-profile corporate scandals. The most notorious are the huge US bankruptcies related to alleged frauds and undoubted executive greed - such as Enron (bankruptcy filing December 2001), Tyco (CEO indicted Jun 2002), WorldCom (bankruptcy filing July 2002) and Qwest (accounts restated by $1bn July 2002). However, the corporate misbehaviour and mismanagement of the late 1990s have not been confined to the US, as examples such as Philip Holzmann in Germany (bankruptcy filing March 2002), Vivendi in France (chief executive forced out July 2002), and the numerous corporate and financial bankruptcies in Japan and Korea since the late 1990s demonstrate. Equally, there has been a widespread regulatory reaction to such events, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US and the Turnbull, Myners and Higgs reviews, whose implementation is self-regulatory, alongside new corporate legislation in the UK.

In the case of global governance, the sense of crisis dates back earlier to the global financial crisis of late 1997-98 and the failure of the WTO talks in Seattle in December 1999. Initially the debate subsequent to these events was framed in terms of reform of the international financial architecture, but the same debate is now more commonly described in terms of governance: international governance on the one hand; and on the other, good governance within individual countries as an aspect of their potential within the global economy.

All international financial institutions and agencies now proclaim their own governance and governance within their member countries to be a priority, and have put considerable institutional efforts and resources into codifying and measuring aspects of good governance. The emphasis on governance has official manifestations ranging from the adoption by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development of a convention outlawing bribery of public officials by businesses to a programme of research on the economic effects of corruption at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

It is harder to pinpoint any particular trigger for the interest in governance in the public sector, but there is nevertheless a vigorous debate on public sector reform in many countries, not just the ...