Global Social Governance: Unfolding the Effects of Global Regulatory Complexes on Decent Work in Central Asia

The concept of decent work has been developed and communicated by the ILO as a strategic re-orientation, in which among others the Core Labour Standards have been developed as a complementary regulatory mode of labour questions. Nonetheless, a variety of indecent working incidents are documented for the Central Asian region, in which a specific nexus of state imposed and privately extracted forced labour that heavily draws on patterns of semi-legal migration, illegal migration and trafficking schemes can be identified. Even though, these developments can be traced back to the region’s Soviet and transformation history, these historical explanations, the paper argues, are not sufficient. Not only, that this nexus of state-private-forced labour combined with specific recruiting strategies based on illegal migration or trafficking schemes pose specific challenges to the new labour regime as developed under the decent work agenda. It furthermore, illustrates the need to shed light on the specific relations between global, regional and national regulations and to unfold the nested and/ or overlapping regulations of trade, migration and labour law in the Central Asian region. The paper therewith pays specific attention to the global governance constellations within global social regulations and their effects on the realities in decent work for migrant workers. The paper theoretically draws on conceptions of regime complexity and is going to analyse central legal and political documents as well as expert interviews applying content analysis.