New article on transnational families in debates on migration and development

How migration interacts with development and how policies can enhance such interactions have, since the turn of the millennium, gained attention on the international agenda. The recognition that transnational practices connect migrants and their families across large distances forms part of this debate. The ways in which policy debate employs and understands transnational family ties nevertheless remains underexplored.

In a new article, DIIS senior researcher Ninna Nyberg Sørensen and Research Fellow Ida Marie Vammen critically discern the understanding of the family in two (often intermingled) debates concerned with transnational interactions: The largely state and policy-driven discourse on the potential benefits of migration on economic development, and the largely academic transnational family debate focusing on issues of care and the micro-politics of gender and generation. Emphasizing the relation between diverse migration-development dynamics and specific family positions, the article shows how an analytical point of departure in respectively transnational motherhood, fatherhood or childhood is linked to emphasizing certain outcomes. By way of conclusion the article sketch out important strands of inclusions or exclusions of family matters in policy discourse and suggests ways to better integrate a transnational family perspective in global migration-development policy.

The article is part of a special issue of the journal New Diversities on the role of migration in the Post-2015 Development Agenda, edited by Ninna Nyberg Sørensen.