Introduction

At the request of ICMPD, the authors of this report had advised on the development of the ICMPD Strategy 2025 at the beginning of the year and presented supplementary proposals in May 2020. The starting point were the central challenges arising from the changes in the migration policy framework in Europe, which have recently been strongly influenced by the effects of the Covid 19 pandemic. The recommendations related to the questions of how ICMPD could take migration policy developments in the EU as well as the interests and priorities of its Member States into account in the coming years and how this should be reflected in ICMPD’s relations with the EU institutions, in ICMPD’s enlargement policy and in its relations with other European and international migration actors.

Now that the «Strategy 2025» has been adopted, the question of its implementation arises. With this additional report, the authors would like to point out an area of action that is of greatest importance for the implementation of the strategy and that could represent a key field of action for ICMPD over the next five years: the strengthening of partnerships with countries of origin and transit. The importance of partnerships in European migration policy was also made clear in numerous contributions to the Vienna Migration Conference 2020. The need to strengthen partnerships can be considered the most important message of the conference.

The starting point for the following analysis is the proposal for “a New Pact on Migration and Asylum”1 presented by the European Commission in September 2020. Here again, the issue of partnerships plays a central role, and the EU Commission points out in numerous places that it considers partnership to be the decisive prerequisite for an effective, sustainable, and legitimate EU policy. However, the Commission’s proposal does not yet sufficiently specify the concept of partnership. This poses an opportunity for ICMPD to contribute its experience and expertise to the new EU asylum and migration policy and to support the ICMPD Member States and the EU Commission in implementing this policy.

The present report begins with a brief analysis of the EU Commission’s proposed Pact on Migration and Asylum and the importance of partnerships within it. However, partnerships are not new to EU and Member State policies. The Member States and the Commission have gained manifold experience with this instrument over the past decades. The report therefore takes stock of the EU mobility and migration partnerships to date, supplemented by an analysis of special experiences of Switzerland with partnerships and the more recent experience that ICMPD itself has gained with partnerships with North Africa. From this, a proposal is derived as to how ICMPD could contribute its specific experience and skills regarding partnerships to the policies of the member states and to EU policies and how a four-part “Consultancy plus program“ could be designed: with consultancy offers for (1) national strategy development within the ICMPD Member States interested in a partnership, (2) coordination among the Member States concerned, (3) consultations by these Member States with the third country, and (4) embedding these consultations in regional processes such as the Rabat or Khartoum processes.