Metagovernance of migration policy in the Asia Pacific region: an analysis of policy tools

ABSTRACT

This article considers how nation states steer transnational forums by examining how the Australian government has ‘metagoverned’ the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime, a multilateral forum with 50 plus members (nation states and international agencies) that was created in 2002 to promote policy dialogue, information sharing and practical cooperation on irregular migration in the Asia Pacific region. A ‘tools-based approach’ is used to analyse the Australian government’s metagovernance of this forum across four dimensions: nodality; authority; treasure; organisation. The overall finding is that Australia has accumulated steering capacity across each of these dimensions and that a ‘tools-based approach’ to metagovernance offers a promising way of understanding differences in steering capacity within transnational forums.

KEYWORDS:

• Metagovernance
• policy tools
• steering
• migration policy

Acknowledgments

My thanks to the senior officials and diplomats who agreed to be interviewed as part of this project. I would also like to thank the participants in the Melbourne-NUS joint workshop on Policy Tools as well as Azad Singh Bali, Mike Howlett, Gerry Stoker, Diane Stone and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ A few caveats are warranted. First, a policy tool can rely on multiple governing resources, and that the primary resource (nodality, authority, etc) that the tool uses to give effect is listed here. Second, often tools are used in conjunction or layered in a ‘policy mix’ to give effect to stated goals (Bali et al 2021; Howlett et al. this issue). The aim of this table, however, is to clarify the primary substantive and procedural tools that are deployed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Fawcett

Paul Fawcett is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Chair of the Political Science Discipline in the School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Melbourne. His research interests lie in governance theory, depoliticisation and anti-politics. Some of this research has been published in journals such as Policy Sciences, Administration & Society, Policy & Politics, Journal of Public Policy, among others.