Whereas climate-induced migration is increasingly recognized as a viable survival means globally, the failure of global migration governance in recent years suggests limited impacts of public agency’s efforts to mitigate extreme policy trade-offs between measures to counter human trafficking and promote international labour migration. Drawing upon the political economic landscape of multi-dimensional vulnerabilities adhered to women in migration, this paper recognizes that human trafficking as a systemic problem. As exhibited in the gendered and ethno-racial normative framework that promotes labour migration and prevents human trafficking, the failure of conventional policy measures to incorporate its subjective nature of domestic labour’s value is therefore identified as a major policy blind spot. Under this premise, this paper intends to advance discussion on building greater institutional capacity and resilience of migration governance. We explore how indexing could offer improved understanding of interactions between institutional and migration outcomes in public policy planning through blind spots and trade-off analysis. We argue that through this approach, more comprehensive assessment of and progress monitoring of policy measures may be feasible, claiming this would enhance response and learning capacity of a public agency to effectively address challenges and monitor counter trafficking initiatives.