SCALAR POLITICS AND NETWORK RELATIONS IN THE GOVERNANCE OF HIGHLY SKILLED MIGRATION

Recently, migration scholars have started to examine the roles of nonstate actors in migration governance. This is also the case in highly skilled migration, as they try to shape local and national migration policies to attract and retain global talent. This article brings together literatures on scalar politics and policy networks to investigate the roles of nonstate actors in highly skilled migration governance in Norway’s petroleum industry. The article makes three arguments. First, national state actors have clearly delineated the spheres of influence in highly skilled migration policymaking. These boundary-setting practices ensure that the state remains in charge of key domains related to international migration and employment. Second, place shapes the (re)scaling and networking practices of public and nonstate actors. Third, new, nonstate actors have emerged that transcend scalar hierarchies through public-private partnerships. The most influential state actors, however, refrain from these alliances to remain neutral in politically charged issues.United States National Science Foundation (1155339

Understanding felt accountability

The literature on autonomous public agencies often adopts a top‐down approach, focusing on the means with which those agencies can be steered and controlled. This article opens up the black box of the agencies and zooms in on their CEO's and their perceptions of hierarchical accountability. The article focuses on felt accountability, denoting the manager's (a) expectation to have to explain substantive decisions to a parent department perceived to be (b) legitimate and (c) to have the expertise to evaluate those decisions. We explore felt accountability of agency‐CEO's and its institutional antecedents with a survey in seven countries combining insights from public administration and psychology. Our bottom‐up perspective reveals close connections between de facto control practices rather than formal institutional characteristics and felt accountability of CEO's of agencies. We contend that felt accountability is a crucial cog aligning accountability holders' expectations and behaviors by CEO's