Invisible development? remittances for housing and transnational reproduction strategies among migrant households in Colombia

In recent years, the Colombian government has embraced the migration-development agenda by designing programmes to channel remittances to key sectors such as housing and finance, in an attempt to institutionalise migrant households’ transnational economic practices. However, little is known about mi...

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Bibliographic Details
Author: Gisela Patricia Zapata Araujo
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2018
Country:Brasil
Institution:Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)
Repository:Repositório Institucional da UFMG
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.ufmg.br:1843/40605
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1843/40605
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8644-5160
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Migration-Development Nexus
Remittances
Housing
Livelihoods
Demografia
Migração
Colombia
Grã-Bretanha
Description
Summary:In recent years, the Colombian government has embraced the migration-development agenda by designing programmes to channel remittances to key sectors such as housing and finance, in an attempt to institutionalise migrant households’ transnational economic practices. However, little is known about migrant households’ multifaceted transnational practices, their broader impact on households’ and localities’ socioeconomic development and migrants’ engagement with these migration-for-development programmes. Drawing on qualitative data collected along the Colombia-UK migration network, this paper contrasts the narrow interpretation of development that underpins the migration-development agenda, as exemplified by the remittances-for-housing programmes implemented in Colombia, with the more nuanced social and economic contributions that remittance-financed housing investments have for migrant households’ and communities’ socioeconomic development. Thus, it provides a more nuanced interpretation of development to account for the often invisible, socioeconomic spinoffs that occur in the process of migrant households’ attempts to produce and reproduce their livelihoods transnationally