The Use of Scenario Planning for Exploring the Future of Migration: Insights from an Expert Survey

Abstract

Scenario planning has been gaining popularity during the last decade as a tool for exploring how international migration flows might change under unknown future circumstances. This approach consists in identifying for an outcome of interest the most impactful yet uncertain drivers of change, to then develop narratives that describe how change in these drivers may impact the outcome of interest. When applied to the problem of international migration, however, scenario planning suffers from limitations that reduce the insights that can be derived from such exercises. In this article, we first highlight these limitations by reviewing existing applications of scenario planning to the problem of migration. Then, we propose a new approach that consists in specifying different pathways of change in a set of six predefined drivers, to then ask experts how each of these pathways might impact both migration flows and the other five drivers. We apply our approach to the case of migration pressure and demand from less developed countries to Europe to the horizon 2050. Results from our expert survey underscore the importance of a wider array of drivers for the future of migration than has so far been considered in previous applications of scenario planning. They further suggest that drivers do not change independently from each other, but that specific changes in some drivers are likely to go hand in hand with specific change in other drivers. Lastly, we find that changes in similar drivers could have different effects in sending and receiving countries. We finish by discussing how enhanced, quantified scenarios of migration between less developed countries and Europe can be formulated based on our results.