An Obsession with Sea Rescue Organisations: Policy-Making Against Migrant Smuggling in Italy

In the current EU migration governance, member states enjoy wide discretion not only in the implementation of migration policy but also in designing policies that either specify, integrate or even decouple from the EU approach. The processes of evidence uploading that we have considered demonstrates, in particular, how several critical issues were brought to the attention of national policy-makers. However, Italian policy-makers did not implement any substantial reform nor did they actively promote any new policies, in spite of the extensive evidence that they received regarding the flaws in the policy regime. This chapter explores the process of policy adoption at the national level, with a view to explaining the reasons for such inaction. I will start off by presenting the mismatch between evidence uploading and policy adoption, focusing on the unjust criminalisation of CSOs and people on the move. Regardless of the extensive evidence available, policy-makers are shown to have decided not to act in this direction, instead adopting different—and somewhat opposite—policies. In this process, the key role of government emerges: in the second section, therefore, I discuss the broader migration and migrant smuggling policy-making approach from an inter-institutional perspective. Lastly, I consider how different policy arenas are nested with one another and influence migrant smuggling policy the overall governance of migration in the EU.