WORLD MIGRATION REPORT 2015 Migrants and Cities: New Partnerships to Manage Mobility
173 5.3.1. Shared financing of migrant inclusion Migrant access to services is closely linked to national and local government relations. Except for the citizenship issue, migrant inclusion – language acquisition, education, civic awareness, health service access and public safety measures – is facilitated locally at the cost of the public purse. There is often a major disjuncture between central migration policies and local urban development plans and capacities, mostly in the area of finance. National and local government relations work well where the federal-local structures permit certain devolution of financial, budgetary and administrative authority and flexibility. Such partnerships can work in terms of infrastructure and basic service delivery when central government responsibility is devolved to local authorities working in partnerships with civil society actors, particularly community-based organizations, migrant associations, the private sector and other interested stakeholders (UN-Habitat, 2007). • In Italy, along with municipal autonomy, budgetary authority has been devolved to local government for small-scale development projects. In this context, translocal projects involving diasporas and private entrepreneurs are thriving in partnership with communities in the origin countries. The Ghanacoop project, for example, involves Ghanaian migrants in the Italian province of Modena as partners with local government and business in small scale agrarian cooperatives in Ghana. The resulting benefits are community development in Italy and socioeconomic development in Ghana.8 • In Catalonia, Spain, co-development funds made available by the State and local authorities support local transnational co-development projects with Moroccan, Senegalese, Colombian and other migrant associations and civil society groups. In this way, the local inclusion of migrants is strengthened while, at the same time, creating small trade links with their countries of origin (Acebillo-Baqué and Østergaard-Nielsen, 2011). • In China, the economic transformation of cities like Fuqing in Fujian province is largely due to the devolution of the approval of foreign investment projects to local government, combined with the investments of Fuqing expatriates abroad, and flexibility by local government towards foreign investors. The growth in Fuqing and elsewhere has boosted education and created jobs, including for the many internal migrants from rural areas. It has also helped mitigate the rural exodus to over-crowded megacities. In China, despite successful urbanization in terms of the creation of new centres of growth or the decentralization of services and production to peri-urban areas or smaller cities, there are huge social and administrative challenges facing local governments in the delivery of services to growing numbers of urban residents. Local governments reportedly receive half the country’s fiscal revenue but are responsible for eighty per cent of national spending (The Economist, 2014). In different parts of Africa, urban governments and service providers have encountered tremendous challenges in coping with housing and service deficiencies alongside rapid population growth (Stren, 2014). Sub-Saharan African cities have been obliged to operate increasingly through a decentralized, 8
For further details about Ghanacoop, see www.iom.int/jahia/webdav/site/myjahiasite/shared/shared/ mainsite/microsites/IDM/sessions/92nd/oware_ppt.pdf