ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, international migration has resurfaced as a
prominent feature of contemporary social and economic life, as reflected in
current political and academic debates in countries across the world. Global
initiatives have emerged, concerned with the regulation of international
migration flows (Overbeek 2002). Efforts to bring all states implicated in
international migration (that is, ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ countries) together
at the global level to discuss multilateral approaches to migration policy
constitute a new phase in the development of migration governance. Reaching this phase has proven to be a major challenge and the issue of
international migration has emerged only gradually on the global agenda. It
was not until 2004 that the ILO devoted its annual congress to the issue of
migrant workers, and it took until September 2006 for the UN to hold a
High-Level Dialogue on the theme of ‘International Migration and Devel-
opment’. In the meantime, an increasing number of UN agencies, inter-
governmental institutions, international financial institutions (IFIs), donor
agencies and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) have begun to engage with international migration in one way or another, some-
times with differing or overlapping mandates and objectives (Newland 2005;
Thouez 2005).
