The local turn in migration management: the IOM and the engagement of local authorities

Migration management subsumes a set of discourses and institutions that aim to coordinate states’ regulation of international migration. However, this paradigm is increasingly recognising the importance of the local scale and its actors. This ‘local turn’ in migration management underlines the necessity for local actors to adapt in order to gain resilience to migration shocks. Grounded theoretically in the Cultural Political Economy approach, this paper examines how the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) is trying to engage local actors in a neoliberal spatio-temporal arrangement. This arrangement reduces the complexity of migration by apprehending the global as the domain of relentless migration flows and the local as a field where pragmatic and partnership-based solutions can be implemented by local actors. To illustrate this arrangement, this paper focuses on the 2015 IOM’s Conference on Migrants and Cities which gathered representatives from local authorities. This conference is an attempt to semiotically and extra-semiotically steer local migration policies. And through an analysis of the opening speech of the Director General of the IOM, this paper explores how this event offers local actors appropriate models of perception, (inter)action and being.