Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Roundtable: Migration Futures: How to inspire forward-looking policy-making on migration and integration in Europe?

(Population, Migration and Refugees)

The EU Policy Lab of the Joint Research Centre (European Commission) is developing a set of tools to enhance EU policy-makers' anticipation capacity in the policy areas of migration, asylum and integration. The aim is to stimulate narratives about different possible futures rather than trying to predict what is going to happen. Scenarios are persuasive stories helping us face up to uncomfortable prospects and think clearly about possibilities we would sometimes rather ignore. Scenarios are multiple and contradictory which allows us to acknowledge that we simply cannot see into the future (the future of migration in Europe being particularly uncertain), but we can try to plan for multiple futures and build strategies to deal with uncertainties. In this session, we will discuss some of these tools (e.g. scenarios, serious game) and brainstorm about how to best to create productive environments in which policy makers and different stakeholders can debate the future of migration and assess possible future implications of the present approaches to migration management and integration.