The local history of the migration-development nexus: policies, actors and experiences in the post-dictatorship Gambia

Abstract

By the end of 2020, at the urging of the European Union, and through the mediation of the World Organization for Migration (IOM), Gambia launched its first National Migration Policy (NMP) proposing a twofold interpretation of the migration-development nexus. On the one hand, the NMP advocates the systemic involvement of the Gambian diaspora in the country's socio-economic growth, valuing migration as a tool for socio-economic change.  On the other, it promotes an idea of development as an engine of settledness that can stem "irregular" migration. The article argues that any initiative promoted under the NMP is bound to encounter the everydayness of local, historically rooted and rapidly evolving declinations of the migration-development nexus. These declinations appreciably diverge from the security agenda promised by the European Union in sub-Saharan Africa. The case-study of Kerewan, a rural community with a well-established diasporic history, engaged in local forms of governing geographic mobility in the service of a collective socio-economic development agenda, helps to understand both the multi-scalar dimension and differential temporalities of the migration-development nexus: the rapid opening in the circulation of funds tied to migration management that occurred in Gambia with the end of the Yahya Jammeh regime in 2017 contrasts with the slow temporality of the ongoing process of adaptation, local appropriation, and socialization of development and migration in which Kerewan, like other Gambian communities, is engaged.