Global Migration Futures: Exploring the future of international migration with a scenario methodology

Preparing for future changes in international migration requires an understanding of the different ways
in which societies may change and how these will affect migration patterns. This requires us to move
beyond traditional approaches of migration forecasting, which tend to focus on a limited set of relatively
certain, easy-to-predict factors, such as demographic trends, and which assume structural continuity, by
exploring methodologies that are suited to examine factors such as geopolitical shifts, economic
restructuring, technological change and environmental change, which are notoriously difficult to
predict, but which we cannot afford to ignore, since they will have a considerable impact on global
migration patterns and trends. To this end, this paper presents the Global Migration Futures (GMF)
Scenario Methodology developed at the University of Oxford’s International Migration Institute (IMI).
The GMF Scenario Methodology integrates insights from migration theory with techniques from the
Intuitive Logics School of scenario planning to enable the simultaneous and systematic examination of
relatively certain and uncertain migration determinants, their future evolution as well as their
implications for population mobility. In addition, this paper discusses the key insights gained through
the application of the GMF Scenario Methodology in different world regions as well as its main
limitations.