| Abstrakt: |
While the 2030 Development Agenda was being prepared, Europe experienced a massive inflow of refugees. In response, many western European donors pointed to the need to bring about ‘development’ in the regions of origin, in an attempt to halt the inflow of people. As such, development is often conceptualized as a place-bound process that focuses on enabling people to achieve a better quality of life ‘at home’, implying that migration is an indicator of development failure. Moreover, the mobility of some is celebrated, whereas that of lower skilled migrants is framed as problematic. Such interpretation of development was also reflected in the millennium development goals, which hardly referred to migration. During the preparation of the 2030 Agenda, there were insistent demands to include migration in the new development agenda. In this article, we analyse the 2030 Agenda and its framing, and consider the potential strengths, weaknesses, potentials and risks in relation to migration. The article questions the ability of the Agenda to reflect the translocal and de-territorialized characteristics of our global economy, and the complex relationships that link livelihoods and lifestyles across distant places. We argue that the tension between migration and development is not a new phenomenon and that the 2030 Agenda will not be able to deliver fundamental changes to the present place-based notion of development and do justice to a mobile world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
