Shifting Governance: Making policies against migrant smuggling across the EU, Italy and Sicily

This research seeks to understand the policy-making dynamics related to migrant smuggling within the European Union, focusing in particular on the Italian case and on the Sicilian sub-case, over the period 2014-2019. The study is based on an operational definition of migrant smuggling (beyond its legal definition) as an area of complexity formed of six different continua charachterising each smuggling event: the ‘smuggling spectrum’. Building upon this, this interpretive case study combines new institutionalist and multi-level governance approaches. This analytical perspective makes it possible to answer the main research question, aimed at understanding how and why agency, influenced by institutional constraints, moves within and across governance levels in the formulation of policies aimed at countering the smuggling of migrants in the EU, Italy and Sicily. Focus is firstly placed on local implementation in Sicily, based on different arenas of agency and on their consequences on policy adoption. Then, the analysis of the national and supranational levels explores policy-making in relation to migrant smuggling, in the light of vertical and horizontal dynamics. This means that shifting up and down processes among the three governance levels are considered, as well as the interaction between different policy areas, different institutions and the impact of non-institutional actors on policy-making. Building upon this analysis and assessing the way in which each actor moves within and across the governance levels, influenced and limited by institutional constraints, this study makes it possible to understand (a) which actors lead the anti-smuggling policy-making process in the EU, Italy and Sicily, and why this is the case; (b) what their approach to smuggling is; (c) what dynamics characterise the relationships between them; (d) how much room there is for processes of information and preference upload; (e) to what extent non-institutional actors contribute to the process of policy adoption.