Sabeth Kessler

Labour migration is a tool to address growing skills and labour shortages, widening the talent pool from which employers can recruit and enabling them to access new skills and ideas. Skills mobility partnerships (SMPs) and related concepts, including Global Skill Partnerships and Talent Partnerships, have gained momentum as a strategy to combine skills development, mobility, and mutual benefit for destination and origin countries. To explore governmental initiatives at the intersection of mobility and skills, the Link4Skills project conducted a mapping of SMPs that have been operating in the past ten years, based on desk research. This working paper presents the resulting Partnership Inventory, including a brief comparative analysis. The inventory aims to provide an overview of existing SMPs to help policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and other stakeholders to better understand existing government approaches.

Despite the emphasis placed on return within EU migration management strategies, existing policies often fail to address the lived realities of returnees. They frequently result in exclusion, stigma, and in some cases, inefficient migration management outcomes. As the research highlights, prevailing return policies often silence returnees, overlooking their agency and perspectives.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Georgia, Iraq, Nigeria and Türkiye, the brief explores how dominant narratives and discourses disconnect returnees from return and reintegration policies, and offers practical, actionable steps for policymakers and practitioners seeking to develop return and reintegration frameworks that are more effective, human-centred, and grounded in the realities of returnees themselves.

Key recommendations focus on enhancing meaningful engagement of returnees in policymaking processes, strengthening operational strategies to meet returnees’ needs, and improving communication channels to bridge the gap between policy and practice.

Authors

Nazanine NOZARIAN (ICMPD), Madeleine HOELD (ICMPD), Sabeth KESSLER (ICMPD), Nassim MAJIDI (Samuel Hall), Juliette SAMMAN (Samuel Hall), Lisa PFISTER (Samuel Hall), Marta ROCHA (Samuel Hall), Daniel PROVOST (Samuel Hall)