Migrant Transnational Participation

Abstract

Contemporary debates on the relationship between migration and development focus extensively on how migrant remittances affect the economies of sending countries. Yet remittances also produce dynamic political consequences in migrants' origin communities. Income earned abroad creates political opportunities for migrant groups to participate in the provision of public services in their hometowns. Focusing on organizational variation in partnerships across time and space, this article examines the conditions under which the transnational coproduction of public goods between organized migrants and public agencies at origin shapes democratic governance. I argue that local citizen inclusion and government engagement interact to determine four different types of coproduction: corporatist, fragmented, substitutive, and synergetic. Using four comparative case studies based on fieldwork in three Mexican states, I trace central mechanisms to organizational forms of coproduction and describe how emergent variation affects democratic governance and state-society relations. I show how transnational forces, when collaborating with local social and political institutions, can profoundly affect democratic development.

Is male out‐migration associated with women's participation in post‐disaster rebuilding? Evidence from Nepal after the 2015 Gorkha earthquake

“…Outside of disaster contexts, the implications of out‐migration have been found to extend widely. Researchers have connected out‐migration with outcomes in politics (Pérez‐Armendáriz and Crow, 2010; Córdova and Hiskey, 2015; Duquette‐Rury, 2016; Wellman, 2021), modes of agriculture (Gray, 2009), and even changes in forest cover (Barbieri and Carr, 2005; Oldekop et al, 2018). Where the migrants are largely men, out‐migration has been further proposed to be a critical factor in the trajectory of women's roles in their household and community (Lawson, 1998).…”