Invisible Development? Remittances and Transnational Family Reproduction among Migrant Households in Colombia’s Coffee Region

• In Event: Incorporating Migrants into the Polity: International Migration, Livelihoods and Sustainable Development

Abstract

Given that migrants and their remittances have become one of the main sources of finance for developing countries, international financial institutions and governments in the North and South have embraced the idea that migrants can act as drivers of economic development in their countries and localities of origin. In recent years, the Colombian government has actively embraced this agenda by designing specific programmes to channel remittances to key sectors such as housing and finance. Although the available evidence suggests that high rates of migration have transformed Colombia into a ‘transnational social formation’, little is known about migrant households’ multifaceted links along the geography of the migration network and their impact on the development and broader socioeconomic dynamics of migrants’ localities of origin.
Drawing on qualitative and quantitative empirical data collected at both ends of the Colombia-UK migration network, this paper explores the intended and unintended economic outcomes that arise in the process of maintaining and reproducing family relations across the transnational social field and it examines how these shape the long term livelihoods of migrant families in Colombia’s Coffee Region. The evidence questions the premises that underpin the migration-development discourse. It does so by providing a more nuanced interpretation of development to account for the socioeconomic spinoffs that occur in the process of migrant households’ attempts to produce and reproduce their livelihoods over the transnational social field.

Author

• Gisela P Zapata Araujo, Newcastle University