Peter Scholten - Mainstreaming versus Alienation: A Complexity Approach to the Governance of Migration and Diversity

Over the past decade, the concept of 'diversity' has gained a leading place in academic thought, business practice, politics and public policy across the world. However, local conditions and meanings of 'diversity' are highly dissimilar and changing. For these reasons, deeper and more comparative understandings of pertinent concepts, processes and phenomena are in great demand. This series will examine multiple forms and configurations of diversity, how these have been conceived, imagined, and represented, how they have been or could be regulated or governed, how different processes of inter-ethnic or inter-religious encounter unfold, how conflicts arise and how political solutions are negotiated and practiced, and what truly convivial societies might actually look like. By comparatively examining a range of conditions, processes and cases revealing the contemporary meanings and dynamics of 'diversity', this series will be a key resource for students and professional social scientists. It will represent a landmark within a field that has become, and will continue to be, one of the foremost topics of global concern throughout the twenty-first century. Reflecting this multi-disciplinary field, the series will include works from Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, Law, Geography and Religious Studies. While drawing on an international field of scholarship, the series will include works by current and former staff members, by visiting fellows and from events of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Relevant manuscripts submitted from outside the Max Planck Institute network will also be considered.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15009

Cover illustration: Joe Raedle / Staff/ Getty Images

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At the source of this book is a profound curiosity and amazement as to how societies govern migration and migration-related diversity. This book brings together pretty much everything I have learned on what drives migration and diversity policymaking. At an early stage of my career I came to understand that rationality only goes part of the way towards explaining policymaking in these areas. I was increasingly drawn towards the study of these policy areas, intrigued by why much of the (rationalist) toolkit that I had learned as policy scientist did not help me to understand policymaking in these areas. For some reason I didnt come across many other policy scientists in these areas, although many were focusing on comparable wicked policy problems such as climate change, welfare state reform and (to a lesser degree) gender .

Since then it has become my mission to develop a better theoretical understanding of the dynamics of migration and diversity policymaking that will contribute to the policy sciences . The road towards this mission was paved with many complexities . My efforts to develop a firm grasp of migration studies literature has given me a thorough understanding of migration and diversity (such as social, historical, economic) phenomena. Based on this understanding I thought I was able to see when policies were right or wrong, or even good or bad. For instance, whether promoting immigrant integration was good or bad, whether integration measures worked or did not work, or whether recognizing environment -induced migration or climate refugees was right or wrong. However, this approach did not really help me to understand the logic of policymaking. It was informed by a rationalist view of policymaking as being driven by a serious conversation with the problem situation.

My work on reflexive research-policy dialogues (PhDthesis, DIAMINT project) provided initial insights into what was later to become the core framework for this book. Developing the notion of reflexivity as part of research-policy relations made it clear that reflexivity was hardly ever achieved. It seemed to me that there was something amiss with the quality of the policy process in the areas of migration and diversity. Reflexivity appeared as a counterfactual condition revealing what was missing.

In subsequent research projects I explored what could be driving policymaking, if it was not rationality or reflexivity . In one of my main contributions to policy science so far, I showed that the concept of multi-level governance assumed a far too well-structured and organized governance approach when compared to the chaotic and disorganized governance relations that I encountered. What I found was disjoined rather than multi-level governance , but once again I did not really understand why this was so. In the IMAGINATION project, my colleagues and I showed that the governance of intra-EU mobility was driven by decoupling between various policy actors and levels on a profound level of defining intra-EU mobility .

My colleagues and I arrived at similar observations in another project on Cities of Migration. This project showed that, in spite of all the theorizing and philosophizing on models of integration and migration governance, there was no one-size-fits-all. Migration and diversity took as many configurations as there were cities in our project, and policy responses differed even more significantly. Importantly, when theorizing that there was a systematic connection between types of diversity and modes of local governance, we observed only a slight correlation. Once more, I was struck by the complex nature of migration and diversity governance, while lacking the conceptual and theoretical tools to make sense of this complexity .