How Useful Is the Concept of 'social Remittances' in Ascertaining the Social and Economic Development Impact of Migration?

Recent research into the underlying social dynamics of financial remittance flows between senders and receivers has emphasised the importance of social context in order to understand what motivates remitters and how the sending of remittances shapes, and is shaped by, relations between senders and receivers. The key point is that the social context matters and studies that exclude it from analysis limit their explanatory capacity. A similar line of inquiry is required of the relatively new concept of social remittances. There has been a tendency in the literature to describe the potential ways in which social remittances can have positive, transformative effects on development (flows of knowledge, ideas etc.) but few empirical studies that ‘unpack’ such processes to show the social dynamics of how this occurs within transnational social fields. This may, in part, reflect (1) the novelty of the concept; (2) a desire to fit it into the same conceptual mould as its financial remittance counterpart, or (3), most provocatively, the extent to which social remittances are a contemporary embodiment of modernistic theories of transferring the ‘right attitudes’ to poor countries (and also perpetuate out-migration by reinforcing ‘cultures of migration’).

In order to address this, and for social remittances to be a useful concept, measurement and comparator in assessing the developmental impacts of migration, a series of related (and fundamental) questions need to be answered: (1) what constitutes a social remittance and how can it be codified for measurement; (2) how do social remittances come to be shared between migrants and non-migrants, and how are the meanings of remittances mediated and reconstructed in the receiving social context; (3) how do they then come to be disseminated between individuals, groups, communities and at other spatial levels; (4) how we can ‘unpack’ social remittances in order to understand the contingencies and conditionalities which determine the extent to which they have positive or negative effects on development; and (5) how can we operationalise a refined concept of social remittances in order to enable comparative study. 

In this paper I intend to address a number of these questions and so further our understanding of this important but intangible concept. My paper is organised in three parts. I firstly provide a review of the recent literature, summarising empirical research and theoretical advances. Secondly, I posit a methodological approach that may be useful in undertaking research into social remittances. Finally, I introduce my own empirical research of contemporary migration movements in Sierra Leone, focusing on communities of origin, prior to the Ebola epidemic but during a period of geographically targeted FDI inflows from the UK and China.