Outsourced Sovereignty? EU Cooperation and Migration Policy Development in Ghana

Seen the perceived inadequacy of traditional migration control policy instruments, European policy-makers have, since the early 2000s, increasingly turned to cooperation with so-called migrant-sending and transit countries as a migration management recipe (Boswell 2003; Lavenex 2006). Scholars have scrutinised the instruments used in the external dimension of the EU’s and member-states migration policy, id est readmission agreements (Apedoju et al, 2009; Cassarino, 2007, …), ‘mobility partnerships’ (Reslow and Vink, 2015), informal ‘regional consultative processes’ on migration (Thouez and Channac, 2006) and informal cooperation on return through memoranda of understanding, pacts and police cooperation amongst others (Cassarino, 2010; El Quadim 2014).

However, this growing body of research focusses very little, or only indirectly, on the perspective and agency of migrant-sending countries in the Global South (an exception is El Qadim, 2014) and the impact of the EU cooperation schemes on migrant-sending countries (an exception is Trauner and Deimel, 2013). This paper tries to address this double research gap by showing how EU cooperation on migration impacts the sovereignty of a migrant-sending country. How do migrant-sending countries strategically respond to a possible loss of sovereignty? Ghana is chosen as a case-study. Building on expert interviews and fieldwork, it is elaborated how increasing EU cooperation has altered the patterns of migration governance of this stable West-African democracy with its continuing migration flows.