Weak by design? Diaspora engagement and institutional change in Croatia and Serbia

Diaspora engagement has increasingly been adopted as a strategy for leveraging migration’s development potential. While a rich literature accounts for the emergence of diaspora engagement institutions, there is less research on how these institutions perform in practice and why they change over time. This article compares change across diaspora ministries in Croatia and Serbia from 1990 to 2015. It was found that institutional change was driven by conflict between parties and within parties rather than by the state’s collective economic or geopolitical interests