Smart Governance and Migration Policymaking via Digital Technology for Sustainable Development

Dear Colleagues,

The phenomenon of migration as such is as old as humanity itself. That being said, migration has received a different connotation during the past few decades, especially as a consequence of the 2015 “migration crisis”. Migration dynamics in an individual state are significantly influenced by the dynamics—as well as by the regulatory and the cooperation parameters—of the environment in which it is embedded, e.g., the European Union. This includes national measures and policies that are in place in the existing legal frameworks, such as the European Union New Pact on Migration and Asylum. In addition, special political or social events, together with political and economic conditions, as well as the legal frameworks in third countries, also play a significant role. Against this background, effective measures can hardly be taken on an exclusively national level and within the boundaries of the individual state. Rather, international cooperation is needed to achieve these goals, both within the EU and with third countries outside the EU, addressed by regulatory policies. This circumstance is also expressed by migration taking the position of a major cross-cutting concern within the Global Compact for Migration, the Global Compact for Refugees, as well as the 2030 Agenda of Sustainable Development. It is exactly these cross-cutting aspects that increase the complexity of the phenomenon of migration to a new level, resulting in migration taking the form of a challenging subject.

Against this backdrop, establishing political control and cooperation for the purpose of achieving desired migration and asylum policy goals proves to be extremely complex. This concerns both the agreement on common goals among different actors at different levels, and the alignment of national policies towards global and European frameworks. The formulation of national goals, strategies, and measures, as well as coordination in the implementation and impact assessment of these measures at different political levels, prove to be equally complex. It is thus necessary to rethink policy actions towards smart migration and asylum governance at national, regional and international levels. 

Smart governance and policymaking refer to the use of digital technology to enable collaboration and participation in a transparent way that involves all relevant stakeholders. For example, smart governance can be applied to refer to the quadruple helix approach, involving science, citizens, as well as the public and economic sector. In this context, big data and associated analytical approaches have the potential to improve insights into the complexity of migration dynamics, and thus, allow for improved evidence-based decision-making. Simulations and computational models can also be used to model these dynamics in order to account for emergent complexity.

The topics relevant to this Special Issue comprise, but are not limited to:

• The improvement of access to migration data by breaking up data silos;
• Data integration and data fusion using semantics for handling spatiotemporal data;
• Development and sustainability of skills and competencies for big data analysis in migration;
• Digital Ethics in the context of data- and technology-driven migration research;
• Normative and legal perspectives towards the regulation of big data usage in migration;
• Governance of extraterritorial interventions via computational social science approaches to assess policy measures and migration dynamics;
• Use of data science and big data in the migration policy cycle;
• Unintended side-effects of policy interventions via data and digitalization;
• Interactions between migration, asylum policy measures, and broader mobility dynamics;
• Smart governance and migration policymaking via digital technology.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Lampoltshammer
Barbara Salcher
Guest Editors

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• data governance
• evidence-based policymaking
• computational social sciences
• migration policy cycle
• migration data harmonization