Mobilising Diaspora to Promote Homeland Investment: the Progress of Policy in Post-conflict Economies

This paper examines the development of policies which seek to mobilise and maximise the potential of diaspora investment in their home countries. While a great deal of migrant entrepreneurship literature which focuses on impacts in the host country, less is known about the impacts of diasporans on home countries. The paper focuses on the three post-conflict Balkan economies of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Montenegro, each of which has large diaspora communities. Through an analysis of relevant literature and policy documents, the paper shows that post-conflict economies are aiming to mobilise the diaspora in response to negative impacts of economic shocks, which in the case of the Balkans has been caused by the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and wars on the 1990s. Similar strategies are being introduced in the three economies but how these translate into coordinated policy differs, with the ability to effectively mobilise the diaspora impacting on future growth. Contributions to scholarship on diaspora communities and policy approaches are discussed. INTRODUCTION The majority of lower income countries have policies to welcome and encourage foreign investment, and often find themselves in competition for such investment (Gillespie et al, 1999; Riddle and Brinkerhoff, 2011; Gamlen, 2014 Dickinson, 2017). With increasing movements of people around the world, such transnational economic activity is becoming an ever more important phenomenon (Van Delft et al, 2000; Mohan, 2006; Ram and Jones, 2008; World Bank, 2016) and a key focus for public policy (Kuznetsov, 2006; Nielsen and Riddle, 2010; Wang and Liu, 2015). This study focuses on one of these strategies, namely the targeting of diaspora communities for inward investment, which has become increasingly institutionalised within newly created ministries of diaspora affairs (Clemens et al 2007). The extant literature on diaspora communities often examines the link between two different countries (Levin and Barnard, 2013), which can facilitate the sharing of capital (Mullings, 2011), technical