Innovating government : migration, development and the state in Morocco and Mexico, 1963-2005

Abstract

Mexico and Morocco have some of the longest standing and most advanced policies linking the emigration of their low-skilled workers to their national and sub-national economic development. In my dissertation, I examine the processes through which the governments of both countries designed the migration and development policies now being emulated by sending countries around the world as models of "best practice." Based on multi-sited longitudinal case studies of the main migration and development policies deployed by both countries, I follow current policy instruments back through their earlier - including failed -- iterations as well as through the multiple geographic and national spaces in both migration sending and receiving areas where those policies were implemented. I argue that Moroccan and Mexican processes of migration and development policy elaboration suggest a need to re-consider the purchase of current models of policy formulation. Most representations of policy design depict a process best described as analytic. Policy makers analyze a problem, identify solutions, and then evaluate their effectiveness. However, the Moroccan and Mexican experiences with crafting migration and development policy, with all of their messy indeterminacy, illustrate a process that was essentially interpretive in character.

(cont.) Policy makers were acting in social and economic contexts that were constantly shifting, that were incessantly being remolded by massive migration patters - and that were, as a result, unintelligible to policy makers and extremely resistant to straightforward analysis. Policy makers engaged migrant and migration communities in interpretative processes through which they generated new meanings, constructed new identities, and forged new relationships, in an effort to make sense of the mutable field in which they endeavored to act. Those insights and connections served as the basis for the new institutions that would come to be regarded as major policy breakthroughs. The institutions provided structures through which the state, migrants, and their communities could re-envision local and national development in an on-going manner and could generate new conceptual and institutional innovations. Stated differently, they built institutional spaces for continuous state learning and innovation.