In Global Governance on the Ground: Organizing International Migration and Asylum at the Border, Nele Kortendiek focuses on the informality of international organization (IO) governance. Her bold approach breaks down assumptions of IOs as coherent collective actors and instead identifies the locus of their governance work within professional communities of practice. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and featuring interviews from staff in both the field and at headquarters, Kortendiek embraces the “practice turn” by highlighting the ways in which IOs address the complex and contentious domain of migration and asylum.

The central case study examined is the Greek island of Chios during the European migration crisis of 2015–2016, chosen due to the preponderance of incoming migrants, the plethora of IOs present, and the author’s ability to immerse herself in the frontline practitioner community. Informed by more than 500 hours of fieldwork, Kortendiek paints a vivid and well-researched picture of Chios as a crossing point actively dealing with crisis.

In her analysis, the author lays out a “loop model of global governance on the ground,” tracing how improvised decisions by professionals working in specific high-migration areas can become routinized and eventually diffused throughout institutions. Field workers are confronted with novel problems at the border and engage in “situated learning,” as they formulate impromptu responses. This practical experimentation is inevitable; unlike diplomats or negotiators, fieldworkers must confront the exigency of migration crises directly. This learning eventually gives way to “stabilization,” in which those ad hoc decisions become part of the institutional repertoire of governance. Kortendiek thus neatly proposes a feedback system in which practice continually informs and expands the governance process. Migration proves a fitting domain to build this theory, given that staff operate both on the ground and from a distance and must regularly engage with practical and political emergencies.

The book’s theoretical framework reimagines governance by separating the practice of implementation, in its varied and ad hoc actuality, from the concept of institutional authority. Governance, in Kortendiek’s understanding, is based on the effects of IO practice, rather than constituting a static feature of IOs as institutions. In this symposium, five reviewers evaluate this novel and minimalist approach to theorizing governance as well as the book’s contributions to the broader topics of IOs and global migration.

As Melissa Siegel notes in her review, Kortendiek’s book highlights how migration and asylum governance happens not only through formal rules but also through everyday practices “on the ground.” Through ethnographic fieldwork, she shows how, as Raffaele Marchetti puts it, “de facto policy actions are implemented, innovated, repeated and somehow standardised.” As Stefan Rother observes, this allows Kortendiek to challenge “the common notion that international organisations such as IOM and UNHCR are coherent unitary actors,” underlining the agency of those who are implementing and innovating with policies on the ground. Using the Chios case study, the author successfully builds a theoretical framework that helps explain migration governance “as it actually is” (see Katerina Glyniadaki’s review). Gerasimos Tsourapas lauds the book’s approach for “moving away from treaties, institutions, and formal authority to examine how global norms of migration and asylum are enacted through everyday organisational practice.”

While the reviewers praised the book’s reframing of IO governance towards everyday actors’ responses to the migration crisis, they also discussed the potential limitations of prioritizing this perspective. For instance, Tsourapas raises the issues inherent to decentering the state as an actor in the IO literature. In the same vein, Marchetti cautions that Kortendiek’s practitioner-oriented “horizontal governance” still requires a robust state-based “vertical” counterpart to effectively grasp the dynamics involved in migration governance.

Scholars also highlight the tension produced by analyzing global governance through a distinctly European example. In their reviews, Siegel and Tsourapas question the generalizability of a theory built on such a unique case, particularly in light of Europe having unusually abundant resources for—and high levels of politicization around—migration. In turn, Rother points out that the 2015–2016 migration crisis amounts to a landscape shift for global migration policy and deserves to be analyzed as more than a case study. Glyniadaki suggests that the analysis could have been strengthened by considering other political mechanisms for dealing with migration, like “externalizing” migrants to third-party countries.

Kortendiek’s call to look beyond conference halls and headquarters and to locate global governance on the ground reinvigorates the study of migration and the IOs that dominate it. Further avenues of research might include norm building “from below” and institutional socialization, as Rother suggests. Ultimately, Global Governance offers an impressively researched ethnography of “the modern IO,” and its findings and proposals push scholars to rethink where power lies in global migration governance and the mechanisms that turn emergency decisions into operating procedures.