The number of international migrants has doubled in the past quarter-century, to more than 240 million. Increasing mobility means that in the future the movement of people across the world will become ever more complex and present new challenges for policy makers. The inclusion of migration in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development confirms and reinforces the important relation between migration and development. By integrating migration, including forced displacement, into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the heads of State and Governments acknowledged that migration needs to work for development and that development needs to work for migration, while not ignoring its potential negative impacts.

The international community is increasingly acknowledging that migrants can make a positive contribution to development, both in countries of origin and destination. The question that must now be answered is “what policies will allow this potential to be realised and minimise any negative impact?”.

Migration’s positive contribution to development is increasingly being recognised and targeted by policies designed to maximise its benefits in countries of origin and destination. But less clearly understood is (1) how migration affects a variety of key development sectors, including the labour market, agriculture, education, investment and financial services, and social protection and health; and (2) how a range of sectoral policies can enhance, or undermine, the development impact of migration. The project Interrelations between Public Policies, Migration and Development (IPPMD) was conducted between 2013 and 2017 in ten developing countries to explore these links, drawing on quantitative and qualitative analysis. This chapter provides an overview of the study’s findings, highlighting the ways in which migration (comprising emigration, remittances, return migration and immigration) can boost development, and analysing the sectoral policies that will allow this to happen. It concludes with a call for a whole-of-government approach in which migration becomes an integral part of countries’ development strategies and is also dealt with coherently on a bilateral and regional level.

The IPPMD project aimed to provide empirical evidence for policy makers on the positive contribution of migration to development and how policy can be used to reinforce these effects. To do so, it developed its unique conceptual and methodological frameworks to look beyond the impact of migration policy to explore the bi-directional links between key sectors and four dimensions of migration (emigration, remittances, return migration and immigration). This chapter gives an overview of the conceptual and methodological frameworks and presents the analytical approach.