Introduction

With its foundations dating back to the early 2000s and grounded in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development¹, the 2018 Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration was a groundbreaking milestone in the history of global migration governance.² As the Secretary-General of the United Nations noted, two years after its adoption, “the implementation of the Global Compact is not an even process and will mean different things to different States”;³ in fact, the recognition of different capacities and priorities is one of the main strengths of the Global Compact for Migration. The 2022 International Migration Review Forum (IMRF) was another milestone, as, for the first time, United Nations Member States and stakeholders discussed progress towards the objectives of the Global Compact for Migration, ending with a unanimous adoption of a Progress Declaration.⁴ 

This chapter builds on chapters in two previous World Migration Reports that chronicled the story of migration governance as the last big multilateral issue being included in the work of the United Nations. A chapter of the World Migration Report 2018 on global migration governance provided a definition of migration governance and outlined key aspects of the architecture relevant to the global governance of migration. It also described key dialogues and initiatives from the beginning of the century that were instrumental to the adoption of the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants in 2016 and to subsequent intergovernmental negotiations. The World Migration Report 2020 offered a procedural and substantive analysis of the development and adoption of the Global Compact for Migration, as well as of the Global Compact on Refugees, including complementarity, coherence and gaps between the two compacts. It also outlined the implications of the compacts and of the establishment of the United Nations Network on Migration for global migration governance.⁵ These chapters, together with the first chapter of the World Migration Report 2022, outlining the key technological, geopolitical and environmental transformations that have shaped migration governance particularly since the start of the pandemic, offer a comprehensive overview of how migration evolved until 2021.⁶ 

This chapter picks up where the chapter of the World Migration Report 2020 that focused on global migration governance left off: specifically, the implications of this new architecture on the subsequent development of international cooperation on migration. It focuses on the 2022 IMRF, while adding historical depth by investigating the extent to which recommendations from the 2005 report of the Global Commission for International Migration (GCIM) – the most important United Nations report on international migration prior to the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants – are reflected in current international cooperation around migration governance. This chapter also highlights remaining limitations of the current architecture in responding to the complexities and realities of migration in the current geopolitical climate, complemented by some reflections on migration governance at the regional level, without discussing migration governance at either national or local levels.⁷ 

After a framing section, the third part of this chapter looks at the evolution of international cooperation on migration in the fifteen years between the GCIM launch (2003) and the adoption of the Global Compact for Migration by Member States (2018), highlighting key events and processes, including the centrality of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) and the impact of systemic crises and geopolitical changes. The fourth section takes a critical look at the outcomes of the IMRF. It is followed by a section that digs deeper into selected contentious issues and key tensions in policy discussions on global migration governance that emerged at the forum. The chapter ends with a reflection on expectations, challenges and opportunities from the first IMRF to the year 2030.