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Beyond authority: governing migration and asylum through practice on the ground

September 2024
European Journal of International Relations 30(1)

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How do international organizations (IOs) govern transnational challenges? Most theories maintain that IOs exercise authority to govern. What these authority-focused accounts tend to overlook, however, are instances of de facto governance. Especially in emerging, contested, and crisis-ridden issue areas, authority has often not been established or become unsettled. Yet, IOs govern here, too. Take the example of migration and asylum: This policy field is characterized by institutional and policy gaps. During the crisis at Europe’s border in 2015–2016, IOs governed mixed movements nonetheless. Through organizing collective action on the ground, they not only created direct regulative impacts on the lives of people on the move (the final addressees of international politics) but also defined what mixed migration means as a global policy concern. I draw on practice theory and fieldwork at the European external border in Greece to draw attention to governing modes that operate at a very low institutional threshold. I propose a minimal conception of governance that shifts attention from authority sources to governing effects to account for such governance forms. This re-conceptualization makes the study of how IOs govern outside their established authority, in concrete geographical places, possible.

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Beyond authority: governing

migration and asylum through

practice on the ground

Nele Kortendiek

Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany

European University Institute, Italy

Abstract

How do international organizations (IOs) govern transnational challenges? Most

theories maintain that IOs exercise authority to govern. What these authority-focused

accounts tend to overlook, however, are instances of de facto governance. Especially

in emerging, contested, and crisis-ridden issue areas, authority has often not been

established or become unsettled. Yet, IOs govern here, too. Take the example of

migration and asylum: This policy field is characterized by institutional and policy gaps.

During the crisis at Europe’s border in 2015–2016, IOs governed mixed movements

nonetheless. Through organizing collective action on the ground, they not only created

direct regulative impacts on the lives of people on the move (the final addressees of

international politics) but also defined what mixed migration means as a global policy

concern. I draw on practice theory and fieldwork at the European external border in

Greece to draw attention to governing modes that operate at a very low institutional

threshold. I propose a minimal conception of governance that shifts attention from

authority sources to governing effects to account for such governance forms. This

re-conceptualization makes the study of how IOs govern outside their established

authority, in concrete geographical places, possible.

Keywords

Global governance, authority, international organizations, practice, competence, crisis,

improvisation, migration and asylum

Corresponding author:

Nele Kortendiek, Institute of Political Science, Goethe University Frankfurt, Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 6,

60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany and Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, EUI, Florence, Italy.

Email: kortendiek@soz.uni-frankfurt.de

1278568EJT0010.1177/13540661241278568European Journal of International Relations X(X)Kortendiek

research-article2024

Original Article

2 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)

Introduction

To respond to global problems, international organizations (IOs) set standards, contrib-

ute to law-making, provide expertise, and create benchmarks. Yet, IO staff not only

address global issues through numbers, standards, policies, and rules, they also use their

access to the field and their professional skill sets to improvise collective action on global

policy concerns. For example, naval officers affiliated with multinational forces created

by NATO and the EU undertake interaction patrols and conduct search-and-seizure oper-

ations in the West Indian Ocean to respond to maritime threats, including piracy and

illicit arms trafficking. What they do is highly informal and experimental: “Counter-

piracy was not a formal UN naval peacekeeping mission”; they “work in the absence of

any shared command structures or formal commitments of states” (Bueger and Edmunds,

2021: 184). Since the International Maritime Organization lacked the means to authorize

or organize any large-scale, multilateral response, “No one is in charge” (Bueger and

Edmunds, 2021: 185). Still, seafarers constructively work together off the Coast of

Somalia. Relying on their nautical skills, they developed new patrolling techniques, con-

duct boarding operations, assist distressed mariners, and detain piracy suspects to secure

international shipping. Similarly, humanitarian professionals working in Haiti and other

crisis zones informally redefine which areas are “safe enough” for humanitarian action

(Beerli, 2018: 79). Frontline humanitarians use their decisional autonomy on the ground

and their personal, professional know-how to contest “no-go zones,” effectively deter-

mining which communities receive aid. In the issue area of migration and asylum, border

guards, rescue professionals, migration lawyers, asylum caseworkers, and humanitarian

professionals spontaneously organized collective action on mixed migration at the

European external border during the migration and refugee crisis. Field-based staff—

employed by various international organizations (IOs), both public and private—impro-

vised extensively to conduct search-and-rescue operations, develop asylum procedures,

and accommodate people on the move. Given the confusion at the border and because

their organizations have limited authority on mixed migration, they utilized their practi-

cal knowledge to find interim solutions.

What should we make of field-based staff improvising to handle migration move-

ments at the border, going off script to “define the legitimate means of thinking and

doing security in the humanitarian space” (Beerli, 2018: 71), and experimenting to

respond to security threats at sea? I argue in this article that the daily, ad hoc activities of

those working at the frontlines of transnational challenges are a form of governance in its

own right. Rather than IO personnel “just doing stuff” or implementing pre-defined rules

and mandates, they govern on the ground. This way of governing is rooted in IO employ-

ees’ personal, professional competence rather than their organization’s collective author-

ity. It is geared at finding pragmatic solutions in complex everyday work contexts and is

not necessarily consciously intended to be governance. Nonetheless, it has regulative

impacts on the lives of target populations. It coordinates behavior, reduces uncertainty,

and defines global challenges as concrete policy concerns. Therefore, I view it as a form

of governance—global governance through practice on the ground.

Most theories of IOs and global governance have overlooked instances of IO staff

governing through practice on the ground. As the examples above indicate, improvised

Kortendiek 3

collective action and decision-making in the field often extend beyond the established

authority of an IO. Because institutionalist and constructivist approaches focus on the

exercise of authority to understand how IOs govern specific issues in world politics

(Barnett and Finnemore, 2004; Hawkins et al., 2006; Sending, 2023; Zürn, 2018), they

have paid little attention to IO activities that occur outside their accepted jurisdictions.

Accordingly, they are analytically blind to IO staff governing in operational spaces and

similar forms of de facto governance (see Gupta and Möller, 2019).

In line with my key argument and the gap in the literature, the article has two main

ambitions and makes two conceptual contributions to the debate on how IOs govern:

First, it draws analytical attention to operational spaces as sites of governance and dem-

onstrates that IOs govern through on-the-ground practice—it sheds new light on a previ-

ously neglected mode of governance. Second, it advocates a shift in analytical perspective

to make conceptual space for this governance mode and similar improvised ways of

regulating global issues. Instead of treating authority—generally defined as the recog-

nized right to rule (Hurd, 1999)—as the starting point for thinking about global govern-

ance, it suggests conceptualizing governance with a view to what it does: constraining

and coordinating behavior to achieve common goals. This more minimalist definition

can accommodate ad hoc, provisional, and non-authorized forms of organizing collective

action on public issues, such as governance on the ground. This is important because

these spontaneous, preliminary modes of governance are consequential (see Best, 2014;

Feldman, 2008) and likely to increase in times of global disorder (Barnett et al., 2021: 4;

Pouliot and Thérien, 2023). However, we can only study them empirically as governance

and think about how they can be legitimized (see White, 2022), if we take them seriously,

conceptually speaking. This is what this article does.

Empirically, the article provides new insights into how international actors govern

“mixed migration.” Mixed migration is a political and analytical category introduced by

practitioners and policy analysts in the late 1990s to designate the flow of refugees,

asylum-seekers, and migrants as increasingly difficult to separate (Van Hear, 2011). It

highlights that irregular cross-border movements include different types of people on the

move, whose motives for migrating range from forced to voluntary and change en route.

To develop and demonstrate the argument and conceptual proposition, I proceed in

five steps. In Section 1, I begin by reviewing the institutionalist and constructivist litera-

ture on IOs as well as global governance scholarship. I show they have difficulty account-

ing for de facto governing dynamics in operational spaces and argue that this is because

they conflate governance and authority. I then propose an alternative definition of gov-

ernance centered on governing effects rather than authority sources to lay the conceptual

groundwork for my argument of governance through on-the-ground practice. Next, I

draw on practice theory’s concept of “competence” (Adler-Nissen and Pouliot, 2014;

Gross Stein, 2011; Pouliot, 2008) to emphasize the importance of everyday decision-

making by the transnational professionals who work in organizations. I argue that IO

field staff use their personal, professional competence to deal with global problems in the

spaces where they become acute. Instead of negotiating authority for their organization

(with state representatives or other IOs), they improvise collective action to regulate

global issues in direct interaction with governance addressees, thereby defining how

these issues are treated in practice.

4 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)

In Section 2, I move on to the case study on migration and asylum governance: I dis-

cuss why the case of staff members from various intergovernmental organizations

(IGOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and regional agencies addressing

mixed migration at the European external border during the migration and refugee crisis

2015–2016 is instructive for studying global governance in the field. The governance of

mixed migration is unique in its intense politicization but at the same time it is useful for

establishing that IOs govern on the ground, especially in emerging, contested, and crisis-

ridden issue areas where IO authority often has not been established or drastically

become unsettled. I also explain my strategies for data collection and analysis. In

Section 3, I present the key findings of the case study to illustrate my argument that gov-

ernance not only flows from the authority of IOs—understood as collective actors—but

also emerges from the daily activities of those who work in close physical proximity to

a governance problem.

Authority and space in global governance

The IO and global governance literature tends to overlook instances of people in organi-

zations de facto governing transnational challenges: that governance results from the

daily activities of a dense network of fieldworkers is surprising for rational-institutional-

ist and constructivist accounts. I argue in this section that this is because they pay too

much conceptual attention to authority and too little to geographical places. I suggest

foregrounding professional practice in the field instead, shifting the perspective from

collective actors and their authority to issues and how they are governed by competent

individuals in concrete geographical spaces.

IO studies

The two main approaches to IOs in International Relations (IR), rational-institutionalism

and social-constructivism, are centered on how IOs obtain, exercise, and extend author-

ity to account for how they govern in different policy fields. Rational-choice approaches,

particularly principal-agent frameworks, focus on states delegating competence to IOs to

explain how they become global governors (Green, 2018; Hawkins et al., 2006). They

analyze why and how states decide to outsource tasks to IOs—as well as operational

units within IOs or non-state sub-contractors—and turn to institutional design processes

to study IOs’ agency and influence in international politics, measuring their degree of

autonomy in relation to states (Olsson and Verbeek, 2018). Accordingly, the main focus

lies on analyzing how much authority IOs wield over states qua their institutional fea-

tures. For instance, Hooghe et al. (2017) developed a comparative measure and extensive

data set of IO authority (cp. Zürn et al., 2021). This allows for comparison of the degree

of formal authority across IOs as well as over time, which is very productive for research-

ing not only how the institutional characteristics of IOs vary and evolve but also for

studying the link between authority and politicization (Zürn et al., 2012) or their likeli-

ness to “die” (Debre and Dijkstra, 2021).

However, this research tends to neglect what IOs do with their authority: It tells us

little about how IOs govern particular problems in world politics. Taking state

Kortendiek 5

preferences as the point of departure, the focus lies on IO formation or decline, and agent

behavior is rarely taken into account.1 Even when IOs make use of their discretion or

engage in agency slack, institutionalist scholars tend to research which losses this incurs

upon states and how runaway agents can be brought back under control (e.g. Da

Conceição-Heldt, 2017). In other words, the starting and ending points for thinking about

IOs in global governance are state interests and their incentives to cooperate. As a result,

institutionalist approaches are very helpful for understanding how IOs come about in the

first place and how they need to be designed to foster multilateral cooperation and per-

form well (Heinzel, 2022; Honig, 2019). However, they overlook the relations between

IO personnel and individual governance addressees unless they are a cause of concern

for states. Thus, they do not offer the tools for researching how independent action by IO

staff members at concrete organizational sites shapes governance outcomes—in terms of

how issues are addressed.

Social-constructivist approaches, for their part, and specifically those that define IO

secretariats as bureaucracies, concentrate on the social relations between governors and

governance addressees. They stress IOs’ legal-rational capabilities to explain why the

governed (be it states, non-state actors, or individuals) have reason to recognize IO

claims to authority and, accordingly, how IOs become autonomous actors in interna-

tional politics (e.g. Bauer et al., 2017). In their seminal work on the power of IO secre-

tariats, Barnett and Finnemore (2004: 20–34) have reconstructed the forms of authority

that IOs embody. They have shown that these go beyond delegated or institutional

authority and include moral and epistemic forms. They have also drawn attention to the

concrete practices of classifying the world, fixing meaning, and diffusing norms through

which IOs not only exercise their authority but also consolidate and extend it.

These arguments have been extended to non-state organizations, showing that NGOs

and other private actors can establish international authority, too (Avant et al., 2010;

Balboa, 2018; Stroup and Wong, 2017). Authority is thus not tied to a formal, public

position. Relatedly, official competence does not always translate into actual social rec-

ognition and influence. Scholars use the distinction between de jure and de facto author-

ity to highlight that international actors’ delegated or legal authority is not always

recognized in practice (Alter et al., 2016; Busch et al., 2022; see also Witt, 2022). They

research the conditions that make a formal, institutional mandate more likely to become

socially accepted.

New, empirical studies that use survey data and experimental methods build on these

earlier insights and assess which bureaucratic credentials are essential for different audi-

ences to consider IOs as legitimate governors. They provide us with nuanced understand-

ings of when domestic elites, citizens, or the general public recognize an IO’s authority

(see Dellmuth et al., 2022). For example, Herold et al. (2021) have shown that civil

servants in national ministries defer their judgment and listen to the advice of IO staff

when they perceive them to be experts.

What these studies of IO secretariats largely overlook, however, are interactions with

target populations in operational spaces. Studies of mission creep (Hall, 2016; Littoz-

Monnet, 2021) or sudden authority expansions during emergencies (Kreuder-Sonnen,

2019) certainly investigate how IO practice can extend formal jurisdiction—or under-

mine authority in the long run (Bradley, 2020). Yet, they usually restrict their analyses to

6 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)

cases where governing activities outside an IO’s mandate later lead to changes in the

authority structure. They are less interested in how particular issues are governed even

before a claim to competence has been translated into an extended/curtailed mandate. It

follows that ad hoc governing rooted in professional practice on the ground is not

accounted for as such.

In sum, although their explanations regarding authority sources differ, rational-insti-

tutionalist and social-constructivist approaches subscribe to the general assertion that

authority—broadly defined as the legitimate or socially accepted right to rule (Hurd,

1999; Lake, 2010)—positions IOs to govern. Accordingly, they research how authority

comes about and is sustained over time. This is, of course, a key question in IO studies.

However, it also entails that governing as practice is almost universally equated with the

exercise of authority and that improvised forms of organizing collective action, outside

of IOs’ established authority, are overlooked as a specific mode of global governance.

We know a lot about how standards, benchmarks, indicators, policies, treaties, and infor-

mal law-making function as governance modes (e.g. Abbott and Snidal, 2001; Lesch and

Reiners, 2023), but it is still unclear how street-level decision-making by IO staff, which

is often not consciously intended or recognized as governance, influences the governing

of concrete issues.

Global governance scholarship

IR theories of global governance, too, commonly define governance as “the exercise of

authority across national borders as well as consented norms and rules beyond the nation-

state, both of them justified with reference to common goods or transnational problems”

(Zürn, 2018: 3–4, emphasis added). Early accounts of global governance follow the logic

that because public issues have become globalized, the authority to deal with them has,

too (e.g. Kahler and Lake, 2003). Starting from the assumption that the international

system is anarchical because, unlike the domestic polity, it lacks centralized enforcement

mechanisms, first-generation global governance scholars argued that for collective deci-

sions to be complied with, rule addressees need to voluntarily defer to global governors

and their norms, rules, and procedures. Therefore, global governors must have authority,

a form of political power that, unlike coercion, works on the basis of social recognition.

In other words, to organize collective action on international issues, IOs must be able to

create binding rules and, therefore, need to be socially accepted as legitimate. Otherwise,

it is conceptually inconceivable that they could claim obedience. Since this understand-

ing of global governance ultimately describes authority relations of prescription and def-

erence, it rests on legitimacy beliefs (Hurd, 1999; Lake, 2010).

More recently, scholars like Zürn (2018), Krisch (2017), Sending (2015), and

Deitelhoff and Daase (2021) have started to promote a more dynamic understanding that

does not emphasize structural changes of the global order or the emergence of new gov-

ernors. They have begun to re-conceptualize global authority as “liquid” and “reflexive”

and turned to practices of legitimation, contestation, and recognition instead of consider-

ing legitimacy beliefs as given (cp. Dingwerth et al., 2019). These authors are more

interested in how different actors in world politics are able to induce deference in con-

crete social relations, for example, by making requests or competing for peer

Kortendiek 7

recognition. Yet they continue to treat authority as the “founding principle” of global

governance, which first must be understood before governing can be examined.

Thinking beyond authority: IOs governing in concrete spaces

To conceptually allow that IOs govern on the ground, I suggest turning this train of

thought on its head. The reason behind this proposition is that if we assume, for example,

that (1) IOs are public administrations that employ experts (actor type) and, therefore, (2)

hold epistemic authority in a particular domain (authority type), then (3) we only per-

ceive the governing activities based on exercising this type of authority. We are analyti-

cally blind toward the knowings and doings that also “affect [. . .] the daily lives and

fortunes of people” (Ruggie, 2004: 499) but stem from other sources. If, however, we

begin at the opposite end of the conceptual equation and investigate the IO activities that

have governing effects on the lives of target populations and trace them to their origins,

we can be analytically receptive toward other sources of IO agency and influence besides

authority. Therefore, I propose understanding governance as a series of activities that

have the same effect as the exercise of authority—instead of treating governing as the

result of a particular type of authority that flows from a particular type of actorness (cp.

Seabrooke and Henriksen, 2017: 3–5; Sending, 2015: 14–18).

What, then, is governance? Generally, governing happens when people organize col-

lective action on issues of common concern that open up or restrict courses of action for

governance addressees. This decidedly minimalist definition is open to different modi

operandi and sources of agency. It emphasizes that global governance is primarily about

achieving collective action to address problems of shared concern by various public and

private actors—who have not necessarily been authorized to do so. In that sense, my

understanding is close to early accounts, as expressed by Czempiel (1992: 250), who

understood “‘governance’ to mean the capacity to get things done without the legal com-

petence to command that they be done.” It is guided by Zürn’s (2017: 8) notion that

authority relationships “may, in some cases, emerge spontaneously—for instance, in cri-

sis situations.” He acknowledges the improvisational side of global governance,

arguing:

If there is a fire in a theater, a few may turn out to coordinate the exit movement without any

such pre-assignment. If the same group of people that spend the evening in the theatre would

sit in an airplane and an emergency evolves, it would be likely that the passengers look at the

same people asking for injunctions.

This thought experiment illustrates how competent people who are directly con-

fronted with an issue make decisions that have enabling or restraining impacts on the

lives of others without being explicitly tasked to do so. Whereas Zürn is mainly inter-

ested in how such spontaneous relations of deference stabilize over time (see also

Sending, 2023), the definition of governance I propose here allows us to conceptually

take these ad hoc interactions themselves seriously.

Ad hoc decisions lie at the heart of global governance through practice on the ground.

For spontaneous decision-making to result in governance, competence matters.

8 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)

Competence—also described as practical knowledge in international practice theory

(Adler and Pouliot, 2011)—is “a skill acquired through experience. It ensures that we

know how to go on; it enables us to handle situations” (Kustermans, 2016: 11).

Competence is thus a functional resource; it describes “specific skill sets to address

tasks” (Seabrooke and Henriksen, 2017: 10). The practitioners that work in IOs can use

it to deal with transnational challenges as they play out in their everyday work contexts.

In addition, competence has a social component: being accepted as competent empowers

people to go into certain situations and expect others to follow their lead (Adler and

Pouliot, 2011: 6–7). Therefore, people often explicitly struggle for competence to wield

influence in specific social contexts (Adler-Nissen and Pouliot, 2014: 893–896; Martel

and Glas, 2023: 235–236). Given the pre-reflexive nature of practical knowledge

(Pouliot, 2008: 270), claiming competence and recognizing someone as skilled also pro-

ceed pre-intentionally, however, as in Zürn’s example above.

The functional and relational dimensions of competence mean that IO staff can use their

skills to organize collective action on specific governance problems. Especially when fac-

ing unforeseen issues, they can rely on their previous work experience and professional

know-how to improvise in practice (see Cornut, 2018).2 In doing so, they make practical

propositions and (implicitly or openly) compete about what constitutes competent profes-

sional action in relation to a concrete challenge. Among them, and in confrontation with

governance addressees, they test different ways of doing things and quarrel over what is

feasible and acceptable practice (see Gross Stein, 2011; Pouliot, 2021: 4–5). If they come

to an understanding of how to handle specific situations, their impromptu actions, geared

toward coping with unexpected problems in their operational environment, then form

improvised, practical solutions that coordinate and constrain target populations’ behavior.

Governance, in this form, thus emerges from the everyday problem-solving by competent

professionals who work in close physical proximity to a global public challenge.

With its focus on improvisation, my specific argument of governance through on-the-

ground practice resonates with recent attempts at analytically capturing the provisional

side of governing. It acknowledges that global governance often happens in the gray

areas between established rules and institutions, continuously responding to the imma-

nent messiness of global affairs (see Best, 2014; Pouliot and Thérien, 2023). Those who

govern have to contend with ambiguity and uncertainty, “effectively building the plane

while flying it,” in Pouliot’s words (2021: 2). Because they change how particular topics

are governed in and through practice, these changes often remain “clandestine”

(Kentikelenis and Babb, 2019) and are never translated into (formal or informal) organi-

zational documents. It also ties in with recent research on how non-state actors take

independent and direct action in global law enforcement (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and

Sharman, 2022; Rankin, 2022). These actors use their specific professional resources—

such as knowing how to file a lawsuit in a domestic court under universal jurisdiction or

blocking fishing vessels at sea to protect endangered species. Finally, my argument is

akin to qualitative peacekeeping research that has stressed for a long time that IO staff

who implement international mandates have to interpret and adapt them extensively to

put them into practice (Autesserre, 2014; Bode and Karlsrud, 2018; Campbell, 2018;

Ruffa and Rietjens, 2023). Like these studies, my argument highlights that we need to

take field staff seriously as policy-makers, going one step further by conceptually treat-

ing their practice as governance.

Kortendiek 9

Overall, the conceptual advantage of the general governance definition proposed

above is that it does not blind us to those forms of governance that, though highly conse-

quential, do not directly flow from an organization’s mandate or informally claimed

jurisdiction (cp. Feldman, 2008; Scholte, 2021). It can accommodate cases of individual

actors governing de facto by using their access to the field and substantive professional

know-how. At the same time, it is not fundamentally at odds with more traditional under-

standings of governance. Rosenau (1990: 9) already pointed out that institutions “con-

note the presence of authoritative principles, norms, rules, and procedures, thereby

running the risk of obscuring the informal, non-authoritative dimensions that are so

essential to the functioning of international orders and regimes.” In other words, I do not

seek to eliminate authority from thinking about global governance. I want to highlight

the governing dynamics that occur before IOs have established authority on specific top-

ics and those beyond formal mandates and frameworks.

Relatedly, with the uncoupling of the authority-governance nexus, I want to draw atten-

tion to the concrete places where governance is made. While social spaces have been

researched intensively over the past decade, especially in IR studies that draw inspiration

from social theory, geographical sites have been neglected. First-generation governance

theorists like Rosenau (1990), Ruggie (1993), and Cerny (1995) made significant theoreti-

cal and analytical innovations by arguing that rule and collective action are not bound by

territoriality. Their ideas of immaterial “domains” (Ruggie, 2004) and “spheres of author-

ity” (Rosenau, 1997: 145) have been very productive for overcoming the “territorial trap”

in IR theory. Yet, and perhaps ironically, this way of thinking has stripped places of deci-

sion-making from their physical connotations and introduced an implicit hierarchical

ordering among “global” and “local” sites—equating the latter with places of implementa-

tion, where decisions made elsewhere are simply carried out and, at times, resisted. Only

very recently have global governance scholars taken up the “spatial turn” in peace and

conflict studies, arguing that it makes sense to examine how spatial constellations influence

the form and substance of governing (e.g. Kimber and Maertens, 2021; Liste, 2016). Smirl

(2015), for example, argues that being bound up in specific natural and built environments

influences how decisions are made. Building on these insights, my re-conceptualization

allows for conceiving different “levels” of decision-making as concrete places rather than

abstract spheres. This draws attention to unexplored policy-making sites—such as borders

and camps, but also forests, factories, oceans, embassies, training academies, board rooms,

and universities—and it moves under-researched actors and their practices, such as field-

workers, trainers, labor inspectors, and consular staff, to the center of analysis. That, in

turn, allows inquiry into fast-paced, informal governing dynamics, such as global govern-

ance on the ground, as it (re-)shifts attention from institutions to issues.

Studying global governance through practice on the

ground

In the previous section, I argued that existing accounts of how IOs govern are ill-equipped

for studying global governance through on-site practice—a distinct mode of governance

that works through competence-based improvisation. In the remainder of the article, I

provide empirical evidence for the existence of this phenomenon in the case of migration

10 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)

and asylum governance. To do so, I first explain why that case is useful for establishing

that this form of governance occurs in global politics. I also sketch the case study’s

broader applicability to other issue areas to reflect on potential conditions that make its

occurrence more likely. I conclude this section by presenting the empirical material on

which it is based.

Case selection

Border guards, lifesavers, migration lawyers, humanitarian professionals, asylum case-

workers, protection officers, paramedics, and social workers—employed by different

regional agencies, IGOs, and NGOs—improvised extensively to respond to mixed

migration at the European external border during the emergency of 2015–2016.

Confronted with mixed movements in their daily work, international field staff relied on

their professional know-how to find ad hoc solutions to this transnational issue. Not

equipped with specific policies and mandates and not consciously intending to govern,

they went off script to cope with situational challenges at the border—thereby develop-

ing provisional practices that coordinated and restrained the behavior of people on the

move. As I show in detail below, they resorted to strategies in line with governance on

the ground, making this a “paradigmatic case” (Flyvbjerg, 2006: 229), which helps

establish that this governing type exists in world politics.

At the same time, the case of IO personnel governing migration and asylum at the

European external border during the emergency is also idiosyncratic because mixed

migration is a new and deeply politicized issue area, the crisis caused strong political and

institutional disruption, and a high number of IOs responded on the ground. This limits

the scope of inference regarding the conditions under which this mode of governance

occurs. However, initial empirical evidence demonstrates that people in organizations

govern in the field—beyond migration and asylum. For example, Bartley (2018: 108–

115) demonstrates that sustainable forestry auditors, who are tasked to verify compliance

with international sustainability standards by local forest managers, effectively negotiate

land rights between indigenous communities and multinational logging, paper, and fur-

niture companies. Taking a “pragmatic approach” (Bartley, 2018: 109), these transna-

tional professionals, supported by NGO representatives, become on-the-ground brokers

encouraging agreements between companies and community leaders. Mandated to check

compliance with standards for responsible forest stewardship, they “have been forced to

attend to thorny issues surrounding the rights of communities” and colonial redress

(Bartley, 2018: 116). In UN peace missions (Autesserre, 2014), in humanitarian opera-

tions by NGOs, the Red Cross, and UN agencies (Beerli, 2018), during the deployment

of World Health Organization experts to the sites in which epidemics broke out (Kreuder-

Sonnen and Tantow, 2022), and in development aid projects by the World Bank and

national agencies (Honig, 2019; Sondarjee, 2021), IO field staff, too, manage moments

of crisis and contention, find new ways to address situational challenges, and fill gaps in

policy frameworks through trial-and-error. These activities often extend beyond the

established authority of their IOs and directly influence the life choices of governance

addressees. In short, there are several issues in international politics, ranging from global

health, humanitarianism, peacekeeping, and state-building to food security,

Kortendiek 11

development, and environmental protection, where we are likely to encounter interna-

tional field staff governing through professional practice.

These examples and the case study that follows also point us to potential conditions

under which global governance on the ground emerges. They indicate that policy areas

that are new or crisis-ridden—and therefore under-regulated with no clear focal IO—

and those with a strong operational dimension, in particular, make governing on the

ground necessary and possible. Field-based staff are removed from headquarters over-

sight, providing them “with substantial leeway in conducting their operations”

(Autesserre, 2014: 26; cp. Campbell, 2018; Honig, 2019). Located at the organizational

periphery, they have autonomy and are the first to be confronted with novel challenges

or changes in the problem structure (Cooper and Cornut, 2019: 309).When new issues

emerge for which no IOs have clear mandates and policy instructions, fieldworkers act

as “first responders,” testing new ways of doing things. In short, we are most likely to

find global governance through on-the-ground practice in the field missions of various

UN agencies, IGOs, and NGOs, as well as in consulates and embassies (Cooper and

Cornut, 2019; Hofius, 2022), technical agencies (Bartley, 2018; Gupta and Möller, 2019),

and other institutions that directly deal with emerging or unsettled transnational chal-

lenges in the everyday. Notably, “the field” does not have to be located in “distant places”

but can be found wherever IO staff are confronted with a concrete governance problem

and improvise to develop local solutions (Yanow, 2004: 15), despite not having been

authorized to do that. Crises, especially “fast-burning ones” (Seabrooke and Tsingou,

2019), are likely to exacerbate these dynamics—not only because they uncover govern-

ance gaps but also because they pressure fieldworkers to act (see Kalkman, 2024). In

sum, there are compelling indications that those interested in the processes and outcomes

of international policy-making have much to gain from studying how transnational pro-

fessionals provisionally govern in these diverse issue areas and organizational sites.3

Methods and data

With this suggested shift in analytical focus comes the challenge of getting close to prac-

titioners in the field. To investigate whether IOs govern mixed migration on the ground,

I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at the European external border in Greece in the

spring of 2016.4 Ethnographic methods have made significant inroads into the discipline

of IR because they are useful for collecting data on experience-near phenomena: they

allow us to reconstruct how practical knowledge organizes the work practices that make

up international politics (Adler-Nissen and Eggeling, 2022). The primary fieldwork

strategy is “being there” or “hanging out” to observe and participate in the daily activities

of practitioners (Nair, 2021). To do that, I joined a small humanitarian NGO on the

Aegean island Chios that specialized in “shore patrol,” the spotting and assistance of

migrant boats, as a volunteer. Chios is a central border-crossing point along the Eastern

Mediterranean migration route and one of the EU’s “hotspot” sites. During the height of

the crisis, an average of about 700 people arrived on the island a day. It was one of the

places where mixed migration became the most virulent, and several international actors

started working there—thus constituting a “microcosm” of IOs governing migration and

displacement in the field (cp. Bueger and Edmunds, 2021: 182).

12 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)

Volunteering on Chios proved to be an effective strategy for accessing that micro-

cosm. It allowed me to quickly familiarize myself with key landing sites, the refugee

camps, the town hall meeting room where coordination meetings took place, as well as

the local café and bar where international practitioners went for lunch and after-work-

drinks: I soon became an active member of inter-organizational community of interna-

tional migration, asylum, and border professionals working at the border. Yet, there are

some limitations to this strategy. Being a volunteer influenced how I moved within the

organizational field and experienced the role of organizational boundaries and formal

mandates because I was not officially accountable to a superior or dependent on a salary.

At the same time, this independence made it possible to immerse myself in different

practices and to speak to all the practitioners involved in the response at the border.5

On Chios, I participated in patrolling the shoreline by car, helped with beach landings

and port disembarkations, attended the weekly IO coordination meeting, worked in the

open campsites, accompanied people on the move to get registered and claim asylum in

the hotspot center, participated in several IO working groups, had lunch with asylum

caseworkers, joined a Frontex crew for breakfast on their boat after a night shift, and

took part in search and rescue exercises. In sum, I collected 530 hours of observations. I

left the island when I felt that experiences started repeating themselves. During my stay

on Chios, I also conducted over 60 conversational and 16 formal interviews with staff

members from the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), the European

Asylum Support Agency (EASO),6 four humanitarian NGOs, and a search and rescue

organization as well as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The interviews were conducted

with people who are experts in a practice due to their long-term participation in it. I

aimed for organizational and professional balance, triangulating information about key

processes, and stopped when I started hearing and seeing the same explanations and

experiences. I disclosed my role as a researcher as openly as possible to everyone I

encountered in the field and obtained verbal or written consent from the interviewees,

who have been pseudonymized for research ethics reasons.7

Mixed migration: governing an under-regulated issue in

international politics

In the following illustrative case study, I show that different IGOs, regional agencies, and

NGOs organize collective action on migration and asylum at the border. I demonstrate

that the daily decision-making of their field-based staff is a form of governance in its

own right, discussing how it differs from discretion (Hawkins et al., 2006) and mission

creep (Hall, 2016)—the main institutionalist and constructivist explanations for field

staff behavior (see Section 1). I begin this section with an overview of the existing gov-

ernance arrangements, highlighting the gaps between them. In line with the conceptual

literature discussed above, governance gaps are understood here as limited formal and

informal IO authority: There are gaps in official mandates and policies, and the IOs

active in this policy field have little informal recognition on mixed migration. Mixed

migration is thus clearly under-regulated, with no focal IO. At the same time, several IOs

Kortendiek 13

operate in this issue area, on the ground. Next, I analyze how those working at the border

navigate these gaps and demonstrate that their everyday problem-solving has governing

effects. In brief, the case study illustrates that under conditions of crisis and contesta-

tion—and thus under-regulation—IOs still govern, through competence-based improvi-

sation in the field. While it cannot specify the exact conditions under which they resort

to this governance mode or the factors that ensure that it produces good outcomes, it

helps establish that this governance type exists.

Mixed migration: the missing regime

Migration is heavily politicized, making institutionalized forms of global cooperation on

the topic near impossible (Kainz and Betts, 2021)—despite an apparent demand for

global collective action (Betts, 2016). Especially large movements by migrants and asy-

lum-seekers that irregularly cross international borders have become a salient global

concern. The joint movement of people who cannot travel through regular labor migra-

tion programs or humanitarian corridors but have to rely on smuggling networks and

other illegal brokers has become known as “mixed migration”—a new category intro-

duced to acknowledge the fact that refugee and migrant movements are difficult to sepa-

rate in practice (Van Hear, 2011). Here, “mixed” refers to two dimensions. First, refugees,

asylum-seekers, stateless persons, returnees, victims of trafficking, unaccompanied chil-

dren, low-skilled migrant workers, “climate refugees,” and other (non-classified) types

of migrants often travel together: Irregular migration flows are mixed. Second, it denotes

the fact that motives for migrating cannot be neatly separated into categories such as

economic objectives on one hand and experiences of human rights violations, oppres-

sion, and persecution on the other. The reasons for irregular migration include a spectrum

of motives—from forced to voluntary.8

Mixed migration falls outside the scope of the international refugee and labor migra-

tion regimes (Koslowski, 2011). Only minimal policy tools exist that could address

ongoing challenges such as the disappearance of children traveling alone, rising numbers

of border deaths as well as limited reception, integration, and return capacities in transit

and host countries (Betts, 2010). Therefore, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon

launched a new initiative in 2016 to address “large movements by migrants and refu-

gees” that resulted in the adoption of the Global Compacts for Migration and on Refugees

in late 2018. However, minimal agreement on which global public good is at stake when

addressing migration and asylum (see Düvell, 2011) means that the compacts are legally

non-binding. Heads of state fight over whether the global governance of migration and

displacement should primarily protect people on the move or reinforce border security.

Some go as far as disputing that migration is an acknowledged fact. These deeply con-

flicting views about what has to be governed, how, and for what purpose make even

minimal agreement on the baselines for joint problem-solving on mixed migration

extremely difficult. As a result, there are still no comprehensive and legally binding

international norms, and no IO has been tasked to deal with mixed movements.9

Of course, several IOs hold partial mandates on mixed migration matters. The

UNHCR has a strong normative mandate to protect asylum-seekers, returnees, and refu-

gees. It thus disposes of formal, delegated authority for governing displacement, and, as

14 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)

the guardian of the UN Refugee Convention, the UNHCR also enjoys recognition of its

moral standing as the protector of refugee rights. In addition, it has proven its legal and

operational expertise in this issue area, fostering and expanding its epistemic authority

on the matter (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004; Hall, 2016). But low- and unskilled migrant

workers and people fleeing gang violence, for example, are outside the UNHCR’s formal

jurisdiction, and the organization has been very reluctant to claim authority for interna-

tional migration, fearing this would limit protection space for people who have been

forced to flee. The UNHCR has been keen to keep the legal-political distinction between

refugees and migrants intact (Feller, 2005; Van der Klaauw, 2010). The IOM also holds

delegated authority on questions of mixed migration as it has officially been tasked with

supporting migrants who are unlikely to receive asylum. It has extensive operational

expertise on migrant returns, border control, crisis management, and increasingly also

humanitarian aid, but it has no normative or policy-making mandate (Frowd, 2017;

Kreuder-Sonnen and Tantow, 2022). While it has proven its technical knowledge and

usefulness as a service provider to the international community, continuously expanding

its remit, the IOM did not try to establish itself as a protection agency, working and pre-

senting itself “like a private company”(Pécoud, 2017: 1622) instead; designing and

implementing projects for states.

Regional agencies like Frontex also address mixed migration. Frontex patrols central

migration routes, registers incoming migrants at the EU’s border, returns rejected asy-

lum-seekers, and sets up border control systems—also outside the EU. EASO supports

and conducts refugee status determination procedures and trains asylum experts in EU

member states and third countries. However, their organizational tasks are restricted to

partial aspects of a highly complex and compartmentalized issue area. And while they

have extended their spheres of influence, especially in terms of geographical scope, they

did not seek formal or informal competence beyond their core tasks, which already con-

fronts these organizations with competing demands that are difficult to reconcile

(Perkowski, 2019; Tsourdi, 2020).

To this list must be added the high number of NGOs that conduct search and rescue

missions, offer assistance to displaced communities, and have recognized expertise as

humanitarian service providers and migrant and refugee advocates. They moved into

some of the empty spaces that had not been filled by public actors and also founded the

Mixed Migration Center, which collects data and offers analyses on mixed migration

patterns. However, as states fear high sovereignty costs regarding international migra-

tion, they restrict space for civil society actors so that NGOs continue to operate in

tightly controlled niches (Cusumano and Bell, 2021; Kalm, 2010).

Myriad public, private, and regional organizations hold different degrees of delegated,

moral, and expert authority (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004: 22–27) and deal with partial

aspects of the migration-asylum nexus. Still, no clear focal organization with formal or

informal authority for mixed migration exists, which creates overlaps and gaps.

Mixed migration’s under-regulation means that large movements quickly lead to cri-

sis scenarios. The recent European migrant and refugee crisis is just one example of how

the absence of effective and integrated international institutions leads to humanitarian

emergencies and crises in governance (Cantat et al., 2023). Rather than being temporary

or exceptional, crises thus appear to result from politicization, creating further uncer-

tainty about institutional responsibilities and necessary policy solutions.

Kortendiek 15

Does this mean that international actors do not govern mixed migration, as some

would argue (Düvell, 2011; Kainz and Betts, 2021)? Or do we see new modes of govern-

ance emerge out of crisis, contestation, and gridlock? In the remainder of this section, I

show that various IGOs, regional agencies, and NGOs indeed organize collective action

on migration and asylum—through their practice in the field. I reconstruct from the per-

spective of international field staff how they coped with the simultaneity of the need for

collective action and governance gaps to show that their spontaneous decision-making in

the field reduces uncertainty, defines mixed migration as a concrete policy problem, and

steers the behavior of migrants and refugees.

Governing mixed migration at the border

IO staff based on Chios improvised to handle the large number of people crossing from

Turkey to Europe, establishing several routines for dealing with mixed movements at the

border. As the field note extract begins to illustrate (see Table 1), border guards, screen-

ers, debriefers, fingerprinting experts, and return escorts deployed by Frontex; asylum

caseworkers affiliated with EASO; UNHCR protection officers; IOM reintegration

experts; as well as humanitarian professionals, migration lawyers, rescue professionals,

and medical personnel working for international NGOs tried out in practice how to man-

age migration and asylum. How did they experience the governance gaps outlined above,

and how did they respond?

Table 1. Field note extract.

We stop in Kioski, at one of the lookout spots on our route, and listen carefully for motor

sounds, screams, or chit-chat. You usually hear a boat before you see it. Tonight, the weather

is fine; the sea is very calm: A good night for a crossing. After fifteen minutes of staring into

the dark, with no sound or movement, we continue our nightly round along the Eastern shore

of Chios. Patrick, a paramedic from Austria, and I share the second patrol shift tonight. We

continue the narrow coastal road down to Katarraktis. Then, we get a call from one of the

Spanish lifeguards. They are out at sea in their rescue boat and guide a dinghy to the small,

rocky beach near Plaka. As we get there, the lifesavers are already in the water, pulling in the

dinghy to land it safely on the rocky shore. People get off the boat quietly and carefully, one by

one, as the rocks are very slippery. One man seems light-headed and disoriented. The lifesavers

hold him closely, assisting him out of the water. A couple of small children and many young girls

are among the people. I help them remove their flimsy live vests—most aren’t even wearing

one. “Are you comfortable walking them back to Ermioni port alone?” Patrick asks me. He

needs to drive back to the warehouse to re-stock his car. I nod and ask the new arrivals if an

English speaker is among them. Ahmad, a young man from Syria, speaks it very well. He wants

to know where we are and helps me explain to the rest of the people, at least to the few who

speak Arabic, that they are on Chios, that we will walk to a safe spot down the road, where

they will get dry clothes and some basic provisions before they will have to go on to the “Vial”

Hotspot, the registration site on the island. The group slowly sets into motion, walking down

the road into the dark, continuing their journey.

(continued)

16 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)

Once they arrive at Agia Ermioni, one of the small fisher ports on Chios’ Eastern shore,

humanitarians and volunteers care for the new arrivals. I help a young mother change her baby.

It is tiny, maybe three months old, and his romper suit is wet from crossing the Aegean Sea.

Then I help her find dry clothes that fit, more or less at least, and hand her a pack of diapers.

Meanwhile, Ben, a long-term volunteer from our team, has called the bus that will transport

people to the “Vial” Hotspot, where people must go first after arriving. Some refuse to take

the bus because a Frontex officer holds one man. The border guard’s name is Wim; the team

knows him very well from their many landings together. He is very agitated, and the woman I

helped change earlier is wildly screaming at him. I watch the scene from afar while I assist the

local volunteers with collecting trash and wet clothes from the landing spot (another refugee

boat had been brought into Ermioni port by the search and rescue NGO earlier that night).

After a while, Wim gives in and lets the man go. Everyone gets on the bus, and the tired bus

driver is happy to be finally able to leave. Wim seems frustrated. He tells Ben how difficult it

is to get to the smugglers. He seems convinced that smugglers are exploiting the people and

just doesn’t understand why they are never willing to testify against them. Ben argues that the

man Wim deemed the smuggler was only steering the boat and was a refugee. While talking to

Wim, Ben receives a WhatsApp message on his duty phone. It’s from “useful Tim,” a Frontex

intelligence officer: The Frontex patrol team has spotted a refugee boat and is towing it into

Chios port. Ben and I drive down to the port in his car, stocked with clothes, water, and

snacks. The boat has not yet arrived, but Joris, another Frontex officer, and one of his Dutch

colleagues are there. Joris tells me that about 60 people are on the boat. The Romanians are

pulling them in right now, but he is unsure where they will land: “Maybe in front of Goodys”—a

café on the other side of the port. We wait in front of the port police’s office for the boat to

arrive while the sun slowly rises.

After the boat docks, the Romanian coast guards disembark the people quietly and in a much-

practiced manner. Then, we do a headcount: 21 men, 28 women, and 23 kids. Ben posts the

number of the new arrivals in the Refugee Partners Group on WhatsApp—UNHCR people

will later compile “daily data snapshots.” While we wait for the port authorities, people, tired

from the crossing, sit down along the dock, many with nothing more than a change of clothes

on their backs or small backpacks. We provide them with water, juice boxes, and cakes.

Eventually, two officers from the port police arrive on the scene: a woman in uniform and a

male officer in plain clothes. “Do you have these bracelets?” the man asks me and wants me to

do a first registration of the new arrivals. I politely decline, insisting that I cannot do any form of

registration. He walks off, mumbling that he will try to find some bracelets himself. The other

officer reluctantly allows us to walk people into the parking lot as the ferry from Athens is

about to arrive. She wants to clear the dock, then leaves herself. A social worker, a doctor, and

paramedics from two large international NGOs arrive in the parking lot and talk to the new

arrivals. They try to find out whether unaccompanied minors are among them and do a first

medical check-up.

Meanwhile, I try to find out whether people can be walked over to Souda, one of the unofficial,

open campsites on the island. I talk to one of the camp managers to determine whether the

new arrivals can be accommodated there. Usually, new arrivals must first be transported to Vial

to get registered, screened, and debriefed. The bus, however, is not coming. Since too many

new arrivals refused to pay the bus fee, the driver says he will no longer be coming to landings.

Stuck in the port’s parking lot with 72 new arrivals, a third of them children, we try to find a

solution to provide them with shelter and get them registered so they can claim asylum and

access the interview procedure.

Table 1. (continued)

Kortendiek 17

Field staff working at the European external border described the situation on the

ground as “chaotic,” “messy,” and “confusing.”10 Their situation was characterized by an

authority dilemma: Working on a sovereign state’s territory, they were bound by the

directions of Greek officials. Yet the Greek authorities were reluctant to assume the

responsibility that comes with their position—and hindered international staff from

doing so in their stead. As a humanitarian worker put it:

It’s a bizarre situation because the reason that the NGOs are here is because the European

Union and the Greek government are overwhelmed. They can’t deal with the influx of people

on their own. Otherwise, there would be no need for us to be here and they would delegate us

different tasks—maybe on the mainland. But at the same time, all of the organizations have to

fairly humbly ask permission to do anything. So it’s kind of this bizarre situation: I think that

the authorities acknowledge that they need us here, but at the same time, they don’t want to be

seen to be condescended to by the humanitarian machine.11

Greek authorities were officially in charge but shirked responsibility, and at the same

time, they hesitated to transfer formal competencies to international actors. Thus, field-

workers were left with extremely vague organizational responsibilities and had to navi-

gate a confused competence structure: “Decisions are made in Brussels; decisions are

made in Athens. But at the moment there is a lot of gray area where we don’t know who

is actually responsible for what.”12

This authority dilemma was associated with pronounced short-termism, in which

policy-making is reactive. Frontline workers lamented the “lack of management, plan-

ning, and foreseeing.” They criticized that “the authorities [were] almost completely

absent”13 at the border and failed to anticipate migration dynamics and the related gov-

ernance challenges. When asked for policy guidance and strategies, decision-makers in

headquarters responded, “Nobody thought of that!”14 and “Yeah, it can take several

months.”15 Field staff from all organizations expressed that they could not rely on clear

mandates, coordination structures, and policy instructions.

At the same time, the lack of a clear institutional framework provided them with

ample room for maneuver. The observational data reveal they were keenly aware that

state inaction and the absence of a central coordinating entity opened lots of space for

independent action. On the ground, they held broad discretionary powers—albeit

involuntarily.16

In addition, frontline staff faced time constraints and the acute need to act because

they were dealing with people who required immediate protection or were actively

demanding answers; as a UNHCR protection officer recounted: “People expect us to be

responsible and to respond to their needs.”17 Unlike official policy-makers in the

European Commission or at the UN and headquarter staff, their direct contact with

migrants and refugees made it impossible for them to dodge decision-making. An EASO

asylum expert put this in a nutshell: “They were in your face every day! [. . .] So, we had

to do something. We couldn’t just sit around and do nothing.”18

To remain capable of acting in this context, IO field staff experimented with new

ways of handling things. In accordance with what I observed, they asserted, “[We] work

in an environment where everything changes a lot, and you have to make decisions, and

18 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)

you have to improvise a lot.”19 One example was search and rescue, the spotting of boats

in distress at sea and the safe disembarkation of all passengers, as one of the rescue pro-

fessionals recounts:

That was all self-organized: Trial and error. At the end of the day, we were taking on a role that

the coastguard should have been doing. [. . .][We] just kind of stepped into that role [and] have

gained a huge amount of experience [because we] have taken on massive responsibilities and

[were free not only to make our] own decisions but also to make mistakes and to learn from

them.20

Through learning-by-doing on the ground, fieldworkers developed detailed routines

for patrolling the shore, spotting boats crossing from Turkey, going out at sea in their

rescue boats to intercept them, steering them to safe landing sites, and assisting them in

getting out of the water. Performing these search and rescue practices affected the life

choices of people on the move in a very straightforward way: Without helping them to

land safely, many would have drowned.

Very similarly, IOM, UNHCR, EASO, Frontex, and NGO staff members organized

the onward transportation from the shore to the registration site, the registration itself,

the accommodation of people on the move, the provision of basic goods—ranging from

water, food, hygiene products, and medical care to clothes and blankets—as well as the

protection of unaccompanied minors, psycho-social support, provisional education pro-

grams, legal aid, asylum interviews, family reunifications, and returns to Turkey or coun-

tries of origin. These activities are, of course, in parts foreseen in mandates, mission

statements, host country agreements, and policies such as the EU Return Directive.

However, even where such instructions existed, these are usually vague, incomplete, and

not easily implemented, and therefore, putting them into practice means that those sta-

tioned on the ground need to be creative and deviate from the few existing policy scripts.

As one of the humanitarian workers put it: “I think the EU has [agreed on] a policy in

their sort of ivory tower. [. . .] And they’ve largely stepped back from dealing with the

day-to-day issues [. . .] There’s such a disconnection between policy and reality.”21

To reconcile “policy” and “reality” and close governance gaps, they relied on previous

work experience and their professional skills. To organize the asylum interviews, for

example, EASO staff and colleagues from other organizations improvised considerably to

map the refugee population on the island, register new arrivals, ensure they could offi-

cially file asylum claims, set a sequence in which to interview people, and determine the

admissibility of the asylum claims in Europe—using their experiential knowledge of hav-

ing worked in airport reception centers, other campsites, and urban refugee contexts.22 In

so doing, they determined who got to claim asylum in Europe—which many observers

describe as EASO staff clearly overstepping their mandates.23 Practical knowledge—

rather than organizational authority—thus turned out to be an essential resource for han-

dling mixed migration at the border: Field-based staff utilized it to improvise, provisionally

governing in the “ungoverned spaces” in between the limited mandates and rules.

Discretion and mission creep?

Autonomous action by the people working for different types of international organiza-

tions is, of course, desired by states and other principals that charge these organizations

Kortendiek 19

with performing certain tasks (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004: 5; Nielson and Tierney,

2003: 8). Because tasking an IO to deal with particular issues necessarily relies on

incomplete contracts and ambiguous mandates, IO personnel always enjoy a certain

degree of discretion. Thus, a certain amount of improvisation is expected when IOs

govern.

Yet, this autonomy is usually constrained by organizational control mechanisms that

monitor whether it contributes to good organizational performance—to prevent agency

slack; autonomous action that is “undesired” (Hawkins et al., 2006: 8). In the context of

an under-regulated issue area like mixed migration, goals and standards for successful

performance have hardly been set, however (cp. Honig, 2019: 194). In fact, interviewees

stressed how much it was up to them to decide what was at stake and required collective

action in the first place—from saving lives at sea and registering incoming migrants to

providing them with legal aid during the asylum procedures. A humanitarian profes-

sional expressed this when describing which organization is doing what at the border:

The volunteer organizations are responsible for greeting the boats when they come in [. . .].

Other actors are responsible for—and “responsible” really isn’t the right word because it’s a

strange situation in that the Greek government and the European Union should be responsible

for all this. So, when I say responsible, I mean they’ve chosen to take on these tasks.24

Overall, the interview and observational data make clear that fieldworkers felt obliged

to “take up the slack” left by official policy-makers. Because the authorities “are so

afraid to take decisions,”25 they chose to take on tasks in their stead because they consid-

ered them essential. Often acting as private persons—but in a perceived public capac-

ity—they improvised to find everyday solutions to situational challenges, thereby

effectively defining what required a public response. Fieldworkers defined organiza-

tional goals and tasks, which arguably goes beyond the discretionary power of putting

policies into practice.

In addition, their impromptu actions, which slowly became routinized at the border to

regulate the large number of incoming migrants and asylum-seekers, were not directed at

expanding their authority. A humanitarian worker expressed this clearly: “People seem

reluctant to want authority—because it’s an impossible situation for almost everybody

right now. So whoever takes authority has to fix a problem—and it’s a problem that’s

unfixable.”26 While it seems intuitive to assume that IO actors would seek to enlarge

their influence by exploiting the opportunities that arose from the ill-defined competence

distribution and the ongoing emergency (Kreuder-Sonnen, 2019; Sending, 2015), the

observational and interview data show instead that “people keep bouncing the ball.”27

In contrast to instances of mission creep, where IO staff “want to expand” (Littoz-

Monnet, 2021: 860), border workers’ activities were not driven by potential authority

gains. For example, a psychologist employed by the IOM said: “Our main work [was]

AVRR [assisted voluntary return and reintegration]. However, it was clear to me that I

want[ed] to do my work, the thing I know.”28 Together with staff members from other

IOs, he organized psycho-social counseling and stress-management focus groups—not

because his organization was tasked to do that or because he wanted to extend IOM’s

jurisdiction but, much simpler, because he faced an apparent need and had “the knowl-

edge to do the things.”29 This final example illustrates that the spontaneous

20 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)

decision-making of field-based staff, rooted in their professional skills, was geared

toward coping with the pressure of having to respond to local demands without adequate

organizational and policy resources at hand rather than taking over formal competence.

Nonetheless, because these activities have a clear impact on how access to fundamental

rights, public health, and education is distributed, IO field staff are “affect[ing] the daily

lives and fortunes of people” (Ruggie, 2004: 499).30

Governing through on-the-ground-practice, before and after authority has

been established

The brief case study demonstrates that international actors organize collective action on

migration and displacement. From search and rescue, registration, and camp manage-

ment to asylum interviews, family reunification, and returns, fieldworkers develop and

perform routines that bring some degree of order to spontaneous, undocumented migra-

tion and the turmoil it causes at transit and destination sites in the absence of safe migra-

tion pathways. Through everyday problem-solving, they reduce uncertainty, define

shared goals, and coordinate behavior. In addition, their professional practices restrict

and enable new courses of action for people on the move, thereby creating immediate

regulative impacts on their lives. Instead of doing nothing, letting chaos and confusion

unfold, they steer behavior to achieve common goals. Therefore, I view their practice in

the field as a form of governing.

These governing activities go beyond IO authority on mixed migration. Fieldworkers

are, of course, endowed with partial mandates, have some recognized expert knowledge

and moral standing in this issue area, and their superiors have signed formal host country

agreements for them to gain access to the field in the first place. Yet, while these explicit

governance instruments might explain their very presence at the border, they cannot

account for the extensive regulatory activities on the ground that extend well beyond

their initial authorization and the recognized competence of their organizations. In addi-

tion, while these provisional ways of addressing migration and asylum at the frontlines

of global governance might become institutionalized in a post hoc fashion (i.e. subsumed

under existing mandates retroactively), they themselves have governing effects even

before they are incorporated into existing authority structures: field staff use their profes-

sional skills to govern at the border, after and before authority has been established.

Conclusion

In this article, I argue that international organizations govern not only through laws,

rules, expertise, standards, and numbers but also through practice on the ground. Drawing

on practice theory’s concept of “competence” and using original empirical material from

a case study of how several IGOs, regional agencies, and NGOs governed mixed migra-

tion at Europe’s border, I maintain and demonstrate that governance can emerge from the

spontaneous organizing of collective action on site and the ad hoc decision-making by

fieldworkers: IOs govern trough on-the-ground practice.

To account for this improvisational, practice-based mode of governance, I have pro-

posed a minimalist definition of governing that does not focus on collective actors and

Kortendiek 21

questions of global order. This definition shifts analytical attention from authority—and

how it is delegated, negotiated, maintained, exercised, and extended—to how particular

issues are treated in practice in concrete places of governance. On the basis of this con-

ceptual groundwork, we can now study preliminary, informal governing dynamics that

otherwise would go unnoticed but which are consequential and likely to increase in times

of global disorder. It also allows us to think about how they can be rendered more

accountable to those people whose lives are permanently changed by this type of global

decision-making.

Further research is needed to determine the conditions under which governing on the

ground and similar forms of de facto governance emerge and successfully produce col-

lective action on public problems. When does field staff decide to improvise and try to

close governance gaps? Which factors determine whether their attempts succeed or fail?

Relatedly, more knowledge is required about the normative consequences of the de-

institutionalization and informalization of governance (see Brosig and Karlsrud, 2024;

White, 2022). If global governance takes place outside established pathways, in person-

alized networks and ad hoc coalitions, who can participate in and benefit from it?

Those interested in the dynamics and outcomes of global governance have much to

gain from studying provisional, messy, and difficult-to-institutionalize forms of govern-

ing. In terms of effectiveness and legitimacy, they are probably second-best to most types

of governance, but under conditions of contestation, crisis and gridlock, they are often

the only governance tools available to IOs—thus determining how global problems are

addressed. Less ambitious in reach and normative quality, they are an empirical reality

that warrants our analytical attention and critical scrutiny.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Jens Steffek, Leonard Seabrooke, Catherine Liu, David Welch, Mark Raymond,

Lisbeth Zimmermann, Marcela Oliveira Silva, Hande Abay, Ben Christian, Tobias Wille, Alex

Tokhi, and Max Lesch for valuable feedback on earlier versions of this article. My heartfelt thanks

go to all my interlocutors.

I-1 12 October 2016 Asylum Expert, EASO

I-2 10 October 2016 Field Staff, IOM

I-3 14 June 2016 Field Staff, UNHCR

I-4 28 April 2016 Field Staff, UNHCR

I-6 10 April 2016 Coordinator, Transnational

Volunteer Team

I-7 6 May 2016 Rescue Professional, SAR NGO

I-8 1 May 2016 Rescue Professional, SAR NGO

I-9 25 April 2016 Field Staff, Humanitarian NGO

I-11 23 April 2016 Field Coordinator, Humanitarian

NGO

I-12 5 May 2016 Field Coordinator, Humanitarian

NGO

I-15 8 May 2016 Island Coordinator, EASO

Interviews

22 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this

article.

ORCID iD

Nele Kortendiek https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6011-1253

Notes

1. But see Johnson and Urpelainen (2014); De Silva and Holthoefer (2024).

2. Social skills also matter, as authors drawing on Fligstein have highlighted (Adler-Nissen and

Pouliot, 2014: 893; Cornut, 2018: 730). Because I am primarily interested in how issues are

regulated (rather than relations constituted), I highlight substantive professional competence

here.

3. That said, it is important to underline the deep political nature of migration. Because of its

inherent link with sovereignty (i.e. the control of a state territory and population), migration is

more strongly contested than most topics in global politics. While we can expect contestation,

crisis, and gridlock—and thus governance gaps—in several policy fields, under-regulation

appears intrinsic with regard to migration. And yet, this is precisely what makes it a useful

case for uncovering the provisional governing dynamics that IOs resort to in such constella-

tions, which, at least in a toned-down version, also occur in other issue areas.

4. I do not view this crisis as a problem caused by large movements but as a crisis in governance.

5. To not distort the decision-making processes that I was observing through my participation,

I mainly shadowed experienced practitioners and took over routine tasks to closely observe

the actions of the transnational professionals at the border. That said, upon several occasions,

I was approached to take over key functions. For example, the Greek port authorities asked

me to organize the registration of incoming migrants and write down their passport details

(which I declined, and referred to a UNHCR protection officer). That fieldworkers have that

much leeway with regard to core responsibilities is one of the empirical findings.

6. Now renamed the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA).

7. I relied on the ethics code of the German Political Science Association. To avoid harm, I did

not include migrants into the study.

8. For a critical discussion of labeling people on the move, see Crawley and Skleparis (2017).

9. The strong politicization of migration and asylum and the resulting “non-governance” can be

seen as a specific governing technique. State in-action and the resulting deaths of migrants

are a means for hardwiring borders and thus a form of “migration management”; that is, the

governance of migration through a set of narratives and practices that aim at disciplining

mobility (Ashutosh and Mountz, 2011; Geiger and Pécoud, 2010; Squire, 2017).

10. I-3, I-8.

11. I-11.

12. I-9; cp. I-1, I-3, I-11, I-15.

13. I-3.

14. I-1.

15. I-9.

16. I-9, I-11.

17. I-3.

18. I-1.

19. I-1.

Kortendiek 23

20. I-7.

21. I-6.

22. I-1, I-6, I-9.

23. Human rights NGOs filed a complained with the European Ombudsman, https://www.ecchr.

eu/en/case/greek-hotspots-complaint-against-european-asylum-support-office-to-the-eu-

ombudsperson/ (access: 28/04/2023).

24. I-11.

25. I-2.

26. I-11.

27. I-3, cp. I-4, I-6, I-9, I-12.

28. I-2.

29. I-8.

30. Street-level decision-making also has repercussions beyond the border: headquarter staff con-

solidate and diffuse practical knowledge across operational sites (Kortendiek, 2021).

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Author biography

Nele Kortendiek is post-doctoral researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt and Max Weber

Fellow at the European University Institute. Her research focuses on three areas: contestation and

change in global governance, policy-making and implementation by international organizations,

and migration and asylum politics. Her first book, Global Governance on the Ground, is forthcom-

ing with Oxford University Press.

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

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Sep 2023

Jori Kalkman

Frontline crisis response is challenging. Emergency responders, soldiers, and humanitarian aid workers all operate at the frontlines of threatening, uncertain crisis situations on a daily basis. Under intense pressure, they need to make a range of difficult decisions: to follow preexisting plans or improvise; to abide by top-down instructions or take discretionary actions; to get emotionally involved or keep a rational distance? These dilemmas define their work but, until now, have not been subjected to systematic investigation. This book conducts in-depth studies of eleven such dilemmas by integrating a wide array of research findings on crisis response operations. The comprehensive overview of crisis response research shows how frontline responders deal with these dilemmas amidst the chaos of crises and forms the basis for the formulation of a theory of frontline crisis response. As such, this book will undoubtedly help to understand, evaluate, and advance crisis response operations.

How Rule Generates Its Own Authority

Chapter

Jul 2023

Ole Jacob Sending

There is hardly any aspect of social, political, and economic life today that is not also governed internationally. Drawing on debates around hierarchy, hegemony, and authority in international politics, this volume takes the study of the international 'beyond anarchy' a step further by establishing the concept of rule as the defining feature of order in the international realm. The contributors argue that the manifold conceptual approaches to sub- and superordination in the international should be understood as rich conceptualizations of one concept: rule. Rule allows constellations of sub- and superordination in the international to be seen as multiplex, systemic, and normatively ambiguous phenomena that need to be studied in the context of their interplay and consequences. This volume draws on a variety of conceptualizations of rule, exploring, in particular, the practices of rule as well as the relational and dynamic characteristics of rule in international politics.

Global Policymaking: The Patchwork of Global Governance

Book

Mar 2023

This book analyzes the politics of global governance by looking at how global policymaking actually works. It provides a comprehensive theoretical and methodological framework which is systematically applied to the study of three global policies drawn from recent UN activities: the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, the institutionalization of the Human Rights Council from 2005 onwards, and the ongoing promotion of the protection of civilians in peace operations. By unpacking the practices and the values that have prevailed in these three cases, the authors demonstrate how global policymaking forms a patchwork pervaded by improvisation and social conflict. They also show how global governance embodies a particular vision of the common good at the expense of alternative perspectives. The book will appeal to students and scholars of global governance, international organizations and global policy studies.

Diplomats on the Frontlines: Knowing and Ordering in Crisis

Article

Dec 2022

Maren Hofius

How do diplomatic practices change under crisis conditions? To explore the possible effects of crisis on diplomatic standards of competence, the article zooms in on the modes of knowledge production of frontline diplomats in crisis. An illustrative case study of European Union (EU) diplomatic practice in Ukraine during the Euromaidan revolution reveals two different modes of knowledge production among members of the local EU diplomatic ‘community of practice’: a rule-following and reflexive mode. The article finds that the reflexive mode of knowledge production surfaces in times of crisis and reflects a heretofore under-acknowledged standard of excellence, the ‘ethics of care’ towards the host state’s citizens. Foregrounding the ‘ethics of care’ as a standard of competence sheds new light on diplomatic ethics and advances International Practice Theory’s ( IPT ) discussion about the normativity of practices and the contested nature of diplomatic competence.

Who governs the globe?

Chapter

Jun 2010

Academics and policymakers frequently discuss global governance but they treat governance as a structure or process, rarely considering who actually does the governing. This volume focuses on the agents of global governance: 'global governors'. The global policy arena is filled with a wide variety of actors such as international organizations, corporations, professional associations, and advocacy groups, all seeking to 'govern' activity surrounding their issues of concern. Who Governs the Globe? lays out a theoretical framework for understanding and investigating governors in world politics. It then applies this framework to various governors and policy arenas, including arms control, human rights, economic development, and global education. Edited by three of the world's leading international relations scholars, this is an important contribution that will be useful for courses, as well as for researchers in international studies and international organizations.

The contested meaning-making of diplomatic norms: competence in practice in Southeast Asian multilateralism

Article

Oct 2022
EUR J INT RELAT

The supposedly fixed set of norms within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), commonly referred to as the “ASEAN way,” is both celebrated and maligned as a key element of Southeast Asian diplomacy. In this article, we contest this orthodoxy through a practitioner-near account of ASEAN diplomatic norms in practice. We find that the “ASEAN way” is best understood as a rhetorical commonplace, a well-established topological resource that social agents use to advance and contest claims of competent diplomatic practice in the ASEAN community of practice. We build on and bridge insights from norm contestation, practice theory, and discourse literatures to develop an original framework for the study of contestation in communities of practice. Drawing from documentary evidence and 61 interviews with practitioners of ASEAN diplomacy, we illustrate our argument by examining contestation in practice in the context of the organization’s response to the Rohingya crisis and the South China Sea disputes.

Beyond authority: governing migration and asylum through practice on the ground

Abstract

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