The Governance of Transnational Care Chains

The concept of transnational care chains helped make visible migration by women from poorer countries to fill growing care deficits in wealthier countries of destination, drawing attention to the exploitation to which this work exposes them and to the social reproduction gaps created by their absence in their countries of origin. This paper focuses on the multi-sited and multi-scaled transnational networks through which migrant domestic workers move – i.e. the ‘mobility chains’ that make the care chains possible. The first section provides a brief discussion of the concept of transnational care chains and the debates to which this has given rise. The second section examines the governance of migrant care workers – i.e. the complex arrangements for moving women from their households through a series of points to the households in which they are employed in the receiving country, paying particular attention to Asia and the Middle East. It then turns to governance for migrant domestic workers, i.e. actions by rights-oriented international organisations (IOs) which aim to institutionalise migrants’ rights, and governance by migrants i.e. migrants’ and their representatives’ political agency’ to claim those rights (Rother 2018: 109). In particular, the way the two work together to produce and make effective ILO Convention No. 189, Decent Work for Domestic Workers.