Fragmented Discretion

Abstract

Abstract Managerialism reconfigures discretionary power in migration governance by embedding efficiency, measurement, and depersonalization into bureaucratic and technological systems. Rather than eliminating judgement, managerial interventions redistribute it across humans, algorithms, and procedural layers, promising transparency while multiplying sites of decision and diffusing accountability. Drawing on two cases, the EU’s asylum relocation mechanism and Canada’s Chinook tool for visa processing, this article conceptualizes fragmented discretion: a mode of governance in which discretionary authority is dispersed across organizational scales and sociotechnical devices that operate under heterogeneous logics. In Canada, spreadsheet-based automation compresses applicant narratives into sortable categories and standardized templates, accelerating throughput while rendering reasons for decisions opaque and legal redress difficult. In the EU, allocation formulas coexist with national and local interests and pressures, recoding binding obligations into context-dependent, selectively implemented practices. Across both cases, managerialism reconfigures rather than replaces discretion, producing new forms of opacity and channelling responsibility away from contestable loci towards distributed infrastructures. These dynamics sustain racialized hierarchies of mobility by laundering bias through seemingly neutral indicators, workflows, and allocation metrics. The authors argue that fragmented discretion marks a transformation in the architecture of discretionary power—diffuse, algorithmically mediated, and multiscalar—rather than a rupture with the past. This reframing clarifies how contemporary border regimes maintain control while constraining avenues for accountability and justice, and it identifies where future oversight, legal design, and empirical research should target: the infrastructural seams where discretion is now made, mediated, and obscured.

Authors 2

1. Karine Côté-Boucher

   Université de Montréal

   Affiliation as printed

   University of Montreal

2. Maartje van der Woude Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University