BRUSSELS — Even as global displacement continues to rise, the political landscape surrounding migration and refugee protection in Europe has shifted amid concerns over reception capacity, housing infrastructure and the pace of irregular arrivals, making access to protection increasingly uncertain. With refugee resettlement places decreasing in many countries, more attention has been given to the creation of complementary pathways, such as sponsorship programmes or use of existing work or study channels.

While complementary pathways have been instrumental in creating additional legal channels through which displaced people can move to safe host countries, these programmes have been resource-intensive to operate, have had missed economies of scale and come with challenges including coordination difficulties and unintentional competition for resources. So far, these challenges have held complementary pathways back from living up to their promise.

A new report by Migration Policy Institute Europe (MPI Europe), Complementary Pathways: Key factors in future growth, recommends the creation of a supportive ecosystem to help scale these programmes and overcome big-picture challenges. The report, by Susan Fratzke and María Belén Zanzuchi, recommends:

  • Engaging government as a core partner. Ensuring government involvement from the outset of the design of programmes typically led by civil society and private partners can result in policy structures that foster growth.
  • Shared understanding about goals and context. Establishing a common understanding of programme goals among all stakeholders at the outset can help avoid misaligned efforts and confusion.
  • Improved communication. The decentralised nature of complementary pathways means multiple programmes may operate in the same departure or destination country with little coordination. Creating formal platforms for communication and collaboration between stakeholders can identify opportunities for coordination and facilitate key information sharing.
  • Shared infrastructure. There may be opportunities, as programmes grow, to generate economies of scale by developing shared infrastructure such as joint application platforms and databases.
  • Sustainable funding. Securing diversified, long-term funding models that include cost sharing between governments and non-governmental actors can ensure the sustainability of pathways that typically have less predictable funding streams than resettlement programmes.

The report emphasises that as these pathways expand, the ultimate goal must remain clear: providing safety to displaced people, protecting them from refoulement and supporting their integration into new communities.

‘Though not without challenges, particularly in a continually shifting political landscape, building this supportive ecosystem can enhance programme coordination, streamline operations and secure greater impact’, Fratzke and Zanzuchi write. ‘A well-coordinated network of complementary pathways promises to not only lighten operational burdens but also to enable programmes to grow more sustainably, ultimately leading to improved outcomes for both displaced individuals and their host communities’.

Read the report here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/complementary-pathways-growth.

The report was produced under the Complementary Pathways Network (COMET) Project, of which MPI Europe is a partner along with other organisations from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. COMET is a transnational partnership that aims to develop a blueprint for complementary pathways in Europe by building the capacity of receiving communities and by creating common tools and quality standards for refugee matching, pre-departure orientation, reception and post-arrival support. Research and tools in the COMET Project, which is co-funded by the EU Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF), can be found at www.cometnetwork.eu.

MPI Europe’s other publications as part of the COMET Project include a brief on supporting refugees’ self-sufficiency out of sponsorship and complementary pathways programmes, as well as a series of fact sheets (translated into Catalan, Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish) with short, digestible insights for policymakers on approaches to matching refugees and sponsors, managing refugees’ expectations, supporting volunteer engagement and monitoring and evaluation of sponsorship and complementary pathway programmes.

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MPI Europe provides authoritative research and practical policy design to governmental and non-governmental stakeholders who seek more effective management of migration, immigrant integration and asylum systems, as well as better outcomes for newcomers, families of migrant background and receiving communities throughout Europe. MPI Europe also provides a forum for the exchange of information on migration and immigrant integration practices within the European Union and Europe more generally. For more, visit www.mpieurope.org.