Motives, Implementation and Side Effects : An interview study about the regionalisation of Sweden's Schengen visa management in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sammanfattning: A challenge when reforming public management is the potential risk of side effects as policy intentions often come with unintended consequences in practice. For the field of International Relations (IR), management reforms affecting the foreign service are particularly relevant as they go beyond the domestic context with potential implications also for state relations with foreign publics. However, little academic attention has been directed towards visa management, which serves not only as a consular function of the diplomatic missions but also plays a key role in facilitating their diplomatic functions as stated in the Vienna Convention. Employing the theoretical perspectives of New Public Management (NPM) and The Visa Dimension of Public Diplomacy, this thesis investigates the intentions and outcomes of Sweden's decision to regionalise its Schengen visa management in Sub-Saharan Africa. The inquiry is based on 15 semi-structured interviews with public officials currently or formerly working at the Swedish Migration Agency, the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Swedish embassies in Abuja, Addis Abeba, Dar es Salaam, Lusaka, Nairobi and Pretoria. The thesis finds the regionalisation of Sweden's Schengen visa management to be an NPM-inspired reform intended to establish economies of scale in visa management. While the reform was motivated to improve cost efficiency and quality in terms of increased uniformity and legal certainty in visa processing, it was meantime anticipated to come with challenges related to resource allocation, transfer of local competence and service delivery to applicants. In practice, the reform has led to permanent side effects on applicants by making the visa process more time-consuming and expensive from a user perspective. Thus, the thesis concludes the regionalisation of the Schengen visa management to be an NPM-inspired reform that focused too narrowly on internal efficiency gains that it overlooked the negative effects on applicants to the detriment of Swedish diplomatic functions in Sub-Saharan Africa.