Through a fractured gaze: The OECD,the World Bank and transnational care chains

Introduction

The concept of transnational care chains captures a complex set of relationships. As Yeates (2005: 5) notes, it ‘points to the buoyancy of the international trade in domestic care services and its centrality to the processes and politics of “globalisation” and capitalist dynamism. This trade forges transnational networks between households and families and a set of ties between countries of different levels of “development”.’ It draws attention to the demand for migrants to provide care in the host countries, the impetus to migrate, the status of those ‘left behind’ and the unequal class, gender and race/ethnicity relations that cut through all these dimensions. Migrant care workers encounter tight immigration policies and blind spots in labour legislation in host countries while their own governments often fail to protect them and their families. As Gottfried notes, ‘claims for workers’ rights by women engaged in care labor are complicated by the lack of enforcement mechanisms within and between states, and by the failure of national states to assume responsibility for ensuring workers’ rights of, and offering adequate social protections to, female migrant workers employed in their territorial jurisdiction’ (2015: 140).

Transnational care chains raise complex governance issues requiring coordinated action across a number of fields and scales of action precisely because they ‘cross a number of jurisdictional boundaries – between different states, different areas of law, and different levels [and agencies] of government’ (Fudge, 2011: 237). Fudge explores the complex interaction of regulatory jurisdictions as they affect the lives of Filipina migrant care workers at the national and sub-national scales in Canada. In this article, the focus is on the transnational scale as part of a broader project exploring the potential for international organizations to contribute to the multi-scalar governance of care migration. ¹ I examine the role of two of these international organizations – the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank. ² The first is an important source of policy advice for its members in the Global North and its Development Assistance Committee (DAC) constituted one of the key sites for the coordination of donor policies (Gore, 2013). It therefore deals with all the relevant policy fields – migration, development and social policy, with gender cutting across all three. The second, the World Bank, which is based in Washington DC and focuses on the South, uses its financial clout and ideational resources to promote its vision of development. More recently, it has begun to deal with migration, including the ‘feminization of migration’.

While both organizations ‘see’ different pieces of transnational care chains, they do so through a fractured gaze. Before turning to the analysis, however, this article discusses how international organizations ‘see’ (or do not see) the world around them, as this is critical to understanding how they tackle global issues.

International organizations and the multi-scalar governance of care chains

Migrant care workers experience ‘partial citizenship’ due to limited rights in receiving nations and inadequate protection by their own governments (Parreñas, 2001: 37). To be sure, the postwar era has seen the development of a layer of ‘global’ rights anchored in UN organizations. Several of the International Labour Organization’s conventions have addressed migrant workers’ rights – No. 97 on migration for employment (1949) and No. 143 regarding the promotion of equal opportunities and treatment of migrant workers (1975). Convention 189 (2011) specifically focuses on the right of domestic workers, many of whom are migrant women, to decent work. In 1990, the UN General Assembly signed the International Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and Their Families but it only came into force in 2003 when it reached the threshold of 20 ratifying states. In 2016 the General Assembly adopted the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, which included a commitment to develop a Global Compact for safe, orderly and regular migration by 2018. In order to strengthen international coordination in this field, the UN also welcomed the International Organization for Migration (IOM) as a UN-related organization. As Gottfried argues however, ‘the UN lacks legal authority and cannot impose sanctions to compel governments either to adopt or to comply with labor conventions’ (2015: 153).

Part of the problem is that migration remains a jurisdiction jealously guarded by nation-states. Nevertheless, there is increasing recognition that some form of transnational cooperation is needed, as states cannot manage on their own (Newland, 2010). In recognition of this, regional systems have emerged such as that governing the free movement of EU nationals. The EU also attempts to coordinate migration policy towards non-EU nationals. There are also a range of bilateral arrangements between sending and receiving countries. Nonetheless, the global governance of migration remains underdeveloped.

One of the ways international organizations (IOs) contribute to the governance of migration is through the production of ideas about shared problems and ‘best practice’ solutions. As Geiger and Pécoud point out, IOs ‘can play an influential role in shaping governments’ decisions … by producing knowledge and analyses deemed relevant to better managing migration, by providing “scientific”, “technical” or “managerial” expertise to states, or by facilitating the exchange of information’ (2012: 5). In other words, IOs occupy an important position in transnational policy networks through which they can diffuse their policy ideas. The OECD and the World Bank are renowned for the use of their cognitive authority to influence state actions. ³

How, then, to study an IO? Barnett and Finnemore’s classic study (1999) postulated that IOs are relatively autonomous bureaucratic organizations that develop distinct cultures, which shape how they see the world and the images they project of it. It is thus important to examine the way they perceive the world. In other words, ‘by “seeing like an IO”, we can increase our understanding of the cognitive and organizational environment that guides an IO’s actions and informs its policy advice to states, which enables a more comprehensive picture of how the everyday business of global governance works in practice’ (Broome and Seabrooke, 2012: 5). It is through such analytic institutions that IOs identify common policy problems and solutions.

Yet IOs are bureaucracies, and as such they ‘factor’ problems into manageable pieces. As a result ‘different segments of the organization may develop different ways of making sense of the world, experience different local environments, and receive different stimuli from outside; they may also be populated by different mixes of profession or shaped by different historical experiences’ (Barnett and Finnemore, 1999: 724). Such internally differentiated ways of seeing make it difficult for IOs to come to grips with global care chains. They ‘see’ pieces of the problem, but have difficulty in putting them together or of grasping relations between them and thus cannot offer comprehensive solutions. A common tendency to divide the world into North and South further contributes to their fractured gaze. IOs fail to perceive commonalities, and the way relations between North and South often serve to deepen, rather than mitigate, global inequalities.

The OECD and the World Bank see themselves as organizations whose authority derives from their cognitive ability, which in turn rests on the production and dissemination of policy knowledge through an internal division of labour that institutionalizes distinct areas of expertise. Each, however, has particular strengths and certain blind spots derived from its structure and mandate. The OECD has a long history of monitoring migration and it has played an important role in identifying the growing care needs of its member countries (Mahon, 2014). While its Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and the Development Centre ‘see’ development, neither has grasped the adverse impact of care chains on sending countries. The World Bank focuses on development in the South and since the 1980s it has incorporated a gender lens, which opens up the possibility for ‘seeing’ the problems posed for sending countries. However, it has only recently taken up international migration and those charged with reflecting on the migration operate at the margins of the organization.

It is also important to recognize that IOs do not exist in isolation from one another. Pécoud has developed the concept of international migration narratives to get at the stereotypes that run through the material produced by IOs and other international entities that deal with ‘what migration is (trends, numbers, dynamics, etc.) and what it should be (through the elaboration of so-called policy recommendations)’ (2015: 3). These narratives work to construct shared ways of seeing by constructing a (depoliticized) understanding and common categories for thinking about migration. Although Pécoud does not focus on the gendered dimension of these narratives, he does note several of these, including that female migration will grow due to increased demand in the North for labour in female-dominated sectors. More specifically, ‘migrant women are needed to enable non-migrant (or “native”) women to work out of their home’ (Pécoud, 2015: 119). In what follows I shall identify these and other gendered migrations that run through the discourses of the OECD and the World Bank.

The OECD

Unlike the rights-focus of UN organizations, the OECD focuses on promoting growth (Schmelzer, 2016). Its remit has however come to include a wide range of policy areas. The units involved in ‘seeing’ pieces of the global care chain include three units in the Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs (DELSA) – the Migration, Social Policy and Health Divisions; the Development Cooperation Division and its important Development Advisory Committee (DAC); and a special agency, the Development Centre. DELSA tends to focus almost exclusively on member states’ domestic policies while DAC, which brings together most of the OECD’s key donor agencies, has played a critical role in shaping the world of development (Gore, 2013). The OECD also has incorporated a gender perspective originally through the work of DELSA’s Working Party 6 (WP6) and later through the Social Policy Division and its Gender Initiative, as well as DAC’s GenderNET. ⁴ The Development Centre’s Gender and Development group prepares the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI).

Migration has been part of the OECD’s remit from the outset. Its well-known Reporting System on Migration, known by its French acronym, SOPEMI, monitors the scale and nature of migration and since the 1980s has collected sex-disaggregated statistics. Women, however, were initially simply seen as family members accompanying the main (male) migrant. No note was made of the migration of women from the South to meet care needs in the North, even though feminist scholars were beginning to document this (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Aviva, 1997). As the new millennium dawned, however, the Division began to express concern about member states’ practice of courting of high-skilled migrants from the South while blocking avenues for those considered low-skilled. As its flagship publication, the International Migration Outlook, noted, given the demand for labour-intensive personal care occupations arising from population ageing and women’s changed roles, blocking avenues for low-skilled workers would simply drive the market underground, fuelling the demand for irregular workers (OECD, 2011a: 15).

While the Migration Division focuses on the concerns of host countries, DAC and the Development Centre concentrate on the link between migration and development. Although in the 1990s, DAC favoured more effective foreign aid to stem the flow of migrants from the South, a decade later it recognized migration – or rather the remittances it generated – as a tool for development. This did not, however, include seeing the sending side of the global care chain. Neither DAC nor GenderNET has taken up that issue.

The Development Centre has paid some attention to this. In a 2007 publication it reiterated the now-standard gendered migration narratives: that ‘daughters are more likely to remit’ but that many women migrants may be more reluctant to return home where ‘they may lose new freedoms acquired in the destination country’ (OECD, 2007: 76–77). Remittances are seen to reduce the likelihood of child labour, but children’s education and mental health may suffer from parental absence. Its Gender Unit’s only study of migration typically focused on the impact of ‘discriminatory institutions’ on women’s migration. The key messages it drew were: (1) discriminatory social norms in origin and destination countries influence female migration and (2) higher levels of discrimination in origin countries lead to higher levels of migration, but only up to a point ‘after which discrimination becomes a barrier to migration’ (Ferrant et al., 2014: 1). In 2014, although the Gender Unit expanded its discriminatory institutions indicators to include unpaid care, this did not lead it to see the needs of those ‘left behind’ nor to reflect on the forces behind demand for care workers in receiving countries (OECD Development Centre, 2014: 27–28). Despite the move to bridge the North and South binary, the OECD continues to reflect a neocolonial bias, an assumption it shares with the World Bank.

Care has been on the OECD’s agenda since the 1970s when WP6 first highlighted the need for child care. In the 1980s, DELSA’s Social Policy Division picked up the call, limited however to the care needs arising from population ageing and a push to get lone mothers off social assistance. No consideration was given to who would fill these positions nor to how to make them more attractive until WP6 took up the issue of who was providing elder care. The latter however focused exclusively on the gender of carers (Christopherson, 1997; Jenson and Jacobzone, 2000), remaining blind to its member countries’ growing recourse to migrant caregivers, especially in Southern Europe. When WP6 was disbanded in 1998, its work was picked up by DELSA’s Social Policy Division but its main study, ‘Babies and Bosses’, ignored the role migrant care workers were increasingly playing in making this possible for women in the North even though, of the countries participating in the study, Canada had a programme targeting care-based migration, and migrants also supply a significant share of child and elder care in Ireland and the UK.

The only OECD report that dealt with the position of migrant care workers was produced by the Health Division. Help Wanted? Providing and Paying for Long Term Care (Colombo et al., 2011) documented the substantial role migrants play in the long-term care sector of several countries and in the home help sector of a numerous others. The report also recognized their vulnerable position within the host labour markets (Colombo et al., 2011: 175–176). While ignoring the other end of the care chain, this study at least recognized the growing importance of migrant care workers and was critical of the lack of protection afforded them. These insights were ignored, however, by the Social Policy Division when it reflected on the need for elder care. In the scant three pages devoted to the issue in Paying for the Past, Providing for the Future: Intergenerational Solidarity (OECD, 2011b) no notice was taken of the role played by migrant care workers.

The OECD’s Closing the Gender Gap, coordinated by the Social Policy Division, recognized the importance of affordable child care and called for a more equal sharing of domestic labour. It also held the promise of breaking the North–South binary, but the report’s analysis remains confusingly segmented between the ‘OECD countries’ and ‘developing countries’, rather than providing an integrated analysis of the increasingly globalized economies across the traditional ‘North–South’ divide and pointing to both the commonalities and the differences, as well as the interconnections between them (Razavi, 2014: 144). While it acknowledges domestic work constitutes an important part of the informal sector in developing countries, not only is it silent on its growing importance in the form of ‘precarious work’ in wealthy OECD countries, but the report also ignores the fact that migrant women form an important part of that marginalized workforce. This lacuna was only partially rectified in the 2017 report to Council, Report on the Implementation of the OECD Gender Recommendations, where less than one page is devoted to ‘the gendered dimension of migration in the OECD’ (OECD Development Centre, 2017: 37–38).

The OECD thus only has a fragmented view of care chains, only seeing certain parts while others remain invisible. Various units are organized to see particular aspects – migration, development, child and elder care – but have not grasped the connections between them. In part, the OECD is inhibited from developing a coherent approach to the global care chains – a relational concept – because it has internalized a bifurcated North–South view of the world. For the most part, DELSA focuses on ‘domestic’ issues facing OECD member countries, while DAC and the Development Centre deal with the ‘other’ in the South. The latter moreover fail to see the implications for migrants or for those ‘left behind’.

The World Bank

Like the OECD, the World Bank has come to see itself as a ‘knowledge’ organization, but one focused specifically on development. The Bank’s research is concentrated in its Washington headquarters, with the bulk carried out by the Department of Economics (DEC). From 1996 to 2014, the research work was divided among five networks, the most important for our purposes being Poverty Reduction and Economic Management (PREM), which housed the Gender and Development unit. In 2014, President Jim Yong Kim reorganized the Bank, eliminating PREM and establishing a cluster of ‘global practices’ and ‘cross-cutting themes’ including gender.

The Bank first began to ‘see’ women following the 1975 World Conference on Women, with the appointment of a ‘Women in Development’ (WID) advisor whose office ‘was located in the Population and Human Resources Department … maintaining its association with what is seen as a “soft” area in the Bank – human resources and social sector planning’ – with external funds accounting for a substantial share of its budget (Miller, 1998: 152). In 1993, reflecting the influence of feminist economist Caroline Moser, the WID Division was replaced by a Gender Analysis and Policy thematic group (Miller, 1998: 156), and moved to PREM. In a nod to gender mainstreaming, it is currently one of the five ‘cross cutting solutions areas’. A relatively new unit, KNOMAD (Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development), is currently responsible for the Bank’s work on migration. Although KNOMAD is located in the DEC, it ‘draws on experts from all parts of the world’ (www.knomad.org/aboutus). Its general work is financed by a trust fund and the Swedish government supported KNOMAD’s study of gender and migration.

Moser’s appointment as head of the Gender Analysis and Policy Group came in the wake of mounting criticism of the adverse impact on women of the Bank’s structural adjustment policies. Her Gender Planning Framework highlighted the connections between women’s productive, reproductive and community management roles and opened the way to the incorporation of time-use surveys to quantify women’s unpaid work. Such surveys helped make the case for gender equality as ‘good for development’ in an organization that prizes quantitative methods and instrumentalist reasoning (Vetterlein, 2012). Although it brought men’s role into view, within the Bank Moser’s insights were translated into a concern with ‘family breakdown’ and a demonization of Third World men (Bedford, 2009: 21).

The World Development Report 2012 focused on gender. However, it saw economic globalization as a source of economic opportunities for women while ignoring the ‘exploitative and disabling forms of [their] inclusion’ (Razavi, 2012: 194) in the informal economy at home or in low-paid jobs in richer countries. More broadly, the report failed to grasp the care crises emerging in both the North and the South (Benería, 2012: 177). Since Grown, a renowned feminist economist, took over the leadership of the Gender Cross-Cutting Solutions Area (GCCSA) in 2014, there has been a greater effort to integrate care into the section’s work. ⁵ Yet the migration of women from poorer to wealthier countries to meet such needs remains invisible and none of the unit’s other publications see global care chains. The gender companion to the 2013 World Development Report referred to the feminization of migration only once (World Bank, 2014: 7). The issue is also missing from the 2016–2023 gender strategy (World Bank, 2015). So, while gender has become part of how the World Bank sees development, care chains have not come into its sights. When the Bank did begin to see parts of the chain, its understanding of gender coloured its perceptions.

Migration did not enter the Bank’s radar until the 2000s. Even today, it is not identified in the organizational chart (1996–2014) nor does it hold a prominent position in the current structure. In 2004, however, after Dilip Ratha’s research documented the importance of remittances, ⁶ the Bank established a research programme on international migration and development, with an overarching concern of how remittances could best contribute to development. A gender dimension was soon added to the Bank’s research as the UN’s data showed that women now accounted for approximately half the world’s international migrants. In collaboration with the International Trade unit, the Bank’s Gender and Development unit produced The International Migration of Women (Morrison et al., 2008). The aim was to do the ‘analytical work that can shape policies to economically empower women migrants as well as women left behind by men’s migration’. While it referred to Ehrenreich and Hochschild’s (2003) path-breaking volume, it offered a superficial reading that reflected the Bank’s own gender stereotypes. It noted that women spend in ways that yield better child outcomes – education, nutrition and reduced child labour – in contrast to men who are more likely to (mis)spend the money remitted by their wives (Morrison et al., 2008: 189). It also cited that volume in support of the thesis that Southern women use migration to escape abusive relationships with their husbands (Morrison et al., 2008: 186, 191–192). At the same time, women’s migration could come at the expense of child well-being (Morrison et al., 2008: 194).

These broad-brush references to Ehrenreich and Hochschild, guided by the trope of poor ‘patriarchal’ Southern men whose wounded masculinity leads to perverse behaviour, offer a selective reading of the chapters. The report focused on the examples that fit gendered migration narratives, while completely ignoring counter-examples provided in the book. While Parreñas (2003: 51) discussed some cases where children suffered from their mother’s absence, she also noted that ‘these children do not necessarily become “delinquent,” nor are their families necessarily broken’. The assumption that a mother’s absence is likely to adversely affect her children is one example of the kind of error to which such generalizations can lead. As Raghuram (2012: 164) notes, ‘in many countries the nuclear family may not be the norm and extended families may be commonplace. … Many women may thus be involved in care distribution which means that the migration of one woman does not have as great an impact on care.’

The report ignored other points about the nature of the structural relationships on which global care chains rest. Migrant women were lauded for boosting productivity in the North by enabling ‘the more educated native-born women in the destination countries to enter the labor force’ (Morrison et al., 2008: 198), while the report remained silent on men’s lack of participation in care work and state underfunding of social services. It failed to note how demand for migrant care workers is linked to ‘the marked failure of First World governments to meet the needs created by its women’s entry into the workforce’ (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003: 8); that Northern women hire women migrant care workers ‘as mistress and maid, employer and employee, across a great divide of privilege and opportunity’ (2003: 11); and that male unemployment in the South was often the result of Bank-supported structural adjustment policies (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003: 11).

The report also took up the issue of temporary migration. While temporary workers may fill short-term needs, the report expressed the fear that they will ‘overstay’ their visas and add to the growing number of undocumented workers. Here it picked up on another gendered migration narrative, suggesting that migrant women might be the best candidates as their attachments to their children make them more likely to return when their contracts expire (Morrison et al., 2008: 196). The report also naively suggested that female migrants themselves would benefit from the export of services under the General Agreement on Trade in Services because the ‘contracts would be between host-country employers (firms or households) and foreign firms employing source country migrant women, rather than between host-country employers and migrant women. This would tend to reduce the likelihood of abuse of female migrants by their employers’ (Morrison et al., 2008: 198). This statement blithely ignores the exploitation by recruitment firms. The report did however capture a dimension of global care chains missing from the OECD’s gaze – what happens to those ‘left behind’ – to the extent that it was concerned with how gender influenced the way remittances were used, with particular attention to their impact on child development and well-being. Its understanding, however, was screened through stereotypes of irresponsible Southern men versus ‘good mothers’ who invest in their children, yet whose absence might psychologically harm their children.

The very novelty of the Bank’s concern with migration however forced it to draw on outside experts, which opened the way to the recruitment of ‘heretics’, represented by a report drafted by Omelaniuk (2005) and a literature review (Fleury, 2016) commissioned by KNOMAD.

Omelaniuk (2005) and Fleury (2016) brought into view the whole length of the global care chain. For Omelaniuk, ‘women are referred to as the “servants of globalization” because many go abroad to serve families of higher social status, while they pass their own caring role to other family members or less fortunate women in their countries of origin’ (2005: 7). For Fleury (2016: 10–11), ‘A chain occurs with increasing women’s labor force participation, whereby employed women hire other women as domestic helpers and caretakers, who then rely on other women, such as their mothers, female relatives, or eldest children, to care for their families, potentially keeping them out of economic or educational opportunities. Although the transfer of caregiving to lower-status women provides economic opportunities to women, the global care chain continues to rely on the gendered role of caregiving and does not address governments’ or employers’ roles in response to the new need for family care.’

Omelaniuk and Fleury recognize that unequal gender relations may contribute to the decision to migrate, but acknowledge that social relations in the sending countries vary in important ways. Such differences shape who cares for those left behind, who receives remittances and how they are used. On the issue of children left behind, Fleury notes that relations can be difficult, but that the children ‘do better when their mother’s work and sacrifice are highlighted positively and when they have stable caregivers and frequently interact with their mothers’ (2016: 29). Governments can help by promoting increased public awareness of migrants’ contribution to their families and communities and providing support for those left behind. Omelaniuk (2005: 15) and Fleury (2016: 32–33) underline the need for sending states to train their labour attachés to provide support for their nationals abroad. Sending states can also play a role in negotiating fair contracts and covering the costs of monitoring them (Omelaniuk, 2005: 15) and monitoring recruitment agencies (Fleury, 2016: 33).

Again, both reports recognize the gender bias in the care jobs for which women migrants are recruited and the resulting low pay, calling attention to how domestic work is often exempted from the protection of labour legislation. Host governments should regulate work hours, health and other social protections for domestic workers and monitor their working conditions, eliminate immigration laws and practices that discriminate against women and make work permits not dependent on a specific employer at least in case of abuse or exploitation (Fleury, 2016: 33). Migrant women should receive the same protections, standards and access to services, including health services, as non-migrants (2016: 32). Fleury also notes that in addition to ratifying conventions designed to protect migrants and domestic workers, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), to which 189 countries have acceded, includes general recommendation 26 on women migrant workers, which can be used by migrant workers and their advocates to press for their rights.

While these reports go beyond the gendered migration narratives to offer a more sophisticated and critical reading, it is important to remember that both reports were produced by consultants, not regular Bank staff. Unlike feminist scholars like Moser or Grown who became senior employees of the Bank, they are not in a position to build the kind of internal alliances needed to challenge the reigning orthodoxy. Omelaniuk’s thoughtful study thus had no impact on the later work done by Morrison et al. KNOMAD is housed in DEC, but it is not clear that it will be able to expand the Bank’s field of vision, which remains focused on making remittances work for development – as it understands the latter process.

Conclusion

With the exception of the two studies commissioned by the Bank, which remain marginal to its vision, neither the Bank nor the OECD ‘see’, and thus try to address, the complex of issues embedded in the concept of global care chains. A key problem running through both organizations is the binary North–South gaze, which inhibits the discovery of shared problems, such as the growth of precarious/informal jobs, and blinds them to the way relations between them, such as transnational care chains, often serve to deepen rather than to alleviate structural inequalities. Both moreover tend to reiterate migration narratives based on superficial gender stereotypes. Nevertheless, there are differences in which parts they see and how they interpret these, differences that reflect each organization’s institutionally embedded primary concerns.

The OECD’s focus remains its member states and their shared problems. Although the Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs (DELSA) has the potential to put some of the pieces together as its mandate includes migration, social and labour market policy, its Social Policy Division remains oblivious to the way member countries rely on migration to meet care needs. The Health Division did acknowledge the poor pay and working conditions which will make it hard to recruit sufficient care workers needed in these ageing societies, while the Immigration Division simply noted the problem posed by the preference for skilled workers at the expense of ‘unskilled’ workers, including those providing elder and child care. However, these divisions have not managed to put the pieces together and propose equitable solutions for receiving countries. Those parts of the OECD charged with ‘seeing’ the South – DAC and the Development Centre – recognize the growing role played by remittances but pay little attention to the feminization of migration and the care drain to which this can give rise in sending countries.

The World Bank, with its focus on development, is concerned with the impact of remittances on the South and has reflected on how gender differences affect this. In the earlier work done by the gender division, the Bank picked up on certain gendered migration narratives which suggest that women remit a greater share of their earnings and invest them in their children, while ‘emasculated’ Southern men were seen as an impediment to such investment, reflecting the neocolonial assumptions that have filtered through the Bank’s discourse on gender. While the Gender Cross-Cutting Solutions Area has begun to pay more attention to care needs, it has thus far ignored the question of migration. KNOMAD seems to be more open to seeing global care chains, at least through the work done by consultants but is likely to have limited impact on the Bank’s views. For the most part, moreover, there is no evidence that the Bank encourages sending states to support their migrants and those left behind. It also largely ignores the vulnerable position of migrant care workers, especially those working in private households, and thus fails to identify the need for policy changes in receiving countries.

The Bank and the OECD’s development units also see the world in terms of gendered migration narratives that help to perpetuate the international trade in domestic care services and do nothing to challenge the unequal relations on which this is based. When they discuss women migrant workers, they tend to reiterate convenient tropes that build on gendered stereotypes of the South. Women’s migration is depicted as a win-win situation: Southern women escape patriarchal attitudes at home and earn better wages than they could there; women in rich countries are freed to take productive jobs fitting their educational backgrounds; poor countries earn foreign exchange and can benefit from the ‘modern’ ideas brought by the diaspora; and rich countries get low-cost temporary workers to fill meet labour market shortages, and need not worry that such workers will stay as women are committed to their families hence likely to return home. What is not ‘seen’ by either IO is well captured by Pécoud (2015: 119):

One could argue that ‘unattractive’ jobs could be made more attractive (thanks to higher wages or better work conditions), which would benefit those who occupy them (whether immigrant or national). One could contest that certain jobs are only for women and one could challenge the logic according to which women’s access to the labour market makes it necessary to recruit foreign nannies. One could point to the social or psychological costs of the mobility of these ‘servants of globalisation’.

This is not to say that such solutions are completely invisible. Before it was eliminated, OECD certainly tried to challenge the low value attached to caring occupations and presumably the global campaign for equal pay for work of equal value that it has joined, with the ILO and UN Women, might help to achieve this. In addition, the OECD’s Starting Strong studies strongly recommended public support for universal, affordable child care (Mahon, 2010). Two studies commissioned by the World Bank tried to draw attention to ways of protecting the rights of migrant care workers and their families while also improving their working conditions. Yet these insights are thus far confined to the margins of both organizations.

Thus the prospect for a meaningful contribution from IOs to a system of multi-scalar governance – capable of coming to grips with the various injustices embedded in transnational care chains – currently looks rather dim. The ILO has produced several conventions that gesture in the right direction. However, few receiving countries have ratified these, reflecting the continued paramount position of nation-states, especially when it comes to migration-related issues. The UN-initiated impetus to forge a Global Compact for safe, orderly and regular migration may hold some promise but will the IOM, which has been given a leading role, manage to assert the centrality of its ‘managed migration’ message at the expense of the rights of all migrants, including women, regardless of their status? Although it may seem heretical in a period marked by growing xenophobia, the answer is not to reinforce national jurisdiction over migration even in its ‘liberal’ form of managed migration, but rather to reform international institutions in a way that challenges the North–South binary and asserts the importance of the kind of care ethic approach discussed by Williams (this monograph issue) relative to the economic logics currently embedded in IOs like the OECD and the World Bank. That will take the coming together of diverse progressive movements across the globe perhaps through the Global Coalition on Migration – utopian maybe, but without such utopias real change becomes impossible to imagine.