SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Migrants’ remittance flows have caught the attention of a wide range of governmental, private sector, and civil society actors, and have been at the centre of global policy interventions aiming to ‘make migration work for development’ over the last two decades. This chapter investigates the emergence of distinct but intersecting policy agenda, aimed at formalising, facilitating, funnelling, and financialising remittances. The analysis reveals a global policy assemblage of logics and practices that display some elements of coordination and coherence, alongside elements of difference and friction. It highlights how policy efforts around remittances have generated relatively fluid cooperation, by dis-embedding remittances as a policy object from the complex and contested migration dynamics from which they originate, and by accepting a selection and hierarchy of priorities regarding remittances that reflect, or at least do not work against, the interests of richer destination states.