Recruiting foreign nurses for the UK: the role of bilateral labour agreements
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Date
29/06/2012Author
Plotnikova, Evgeniya
Metadata
Abstract
This thesis is about policy instruments for the regulation of international labour
mobility. It focuses on the use of government-to-government agreements on the
cross-border movement of nurses, negotiated between source and destination
countries. This research is a qualitative case study of agreements signed in the early
2000s between the UK and Spain, South Africa, the Philippines and India. It aims to
understand the role of these agreements in British policy as perceived by actors in the
destination country. It addresses three questions: 1) What types of agreements did the
British government negotiate? 2) Why did the British government negotiate these
agreements? and 3) What functions did these agreements perform?
Employing the notion of ‘policy tools’ as an organising concept, this thesis’s
analytical framework draws on political sociology and the conception of policy
instruments as being composed and brought into existence by actors and their power
relations in multilevel policy contexts. This study is based on documentary analysis
and elite interviews with experts in international organisations, officials in the
Department of Health (England), recruitment officers in the source countries, and
professional nursing organisations and trade unions in the UK.
This thesis argues that government-to-government agreements between the UK and
supply countries emerged from a discourse on the ethical recruitment of health
workers which was framed in the language of human rights. One of the roles of these
agreements was to contain contradictory and conflicting interests between and within
institutional actors involved in the international recruitment of nurses on both sides of
the migration process. More broadly, the research addresses and advances the
discussion of the policy instrumentation approach, and contributes to the
understanding of the choice of policy tools and their performance in an ambivalent
policy context.