Integrating Migration and Development Policies: Challenges for ACP-EU Cooperation

The European Union's external action is in the process of becoming steadily more complex as the Member States agree, step by step, to tackle more of their relations with the wider world at the Union level. TheDraftEuropean Constitution currently in the process of ratification will further intensify this process. As a result, the EU development cooperation sector finds itself increasingly having to work in synergy with polices associated with trade, security, migration, development and external relations. Likewise with development cooperation, these other policy areas also require adjustment and rethinking of past practices and approaches by the stakeholders involved.

This Discussion Paper written by Adam Higazi, a former Research Assistant at ECDPM and now a PhD student at Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford, is intended as a contribution to this adjustment process. It looks at the areas of overlap between the two policy fields of migration and development and seeks to demonstrate how the two might work together. We hope that it will stimulate reflection, provide insights and help introduce development practitioners in both the ACP and the EU to a subject that they have often been reluctant to take on board because of its association with the restrictive image of 'Fortress Europe'.