Diaspora Networks and Economic Development at Home: Three Points

Abstract

In a newly discovered consensus across international business literature, outside of traditional domains of sociology and history, diaspora networks are argued to be the first movers in economic development with a promise of robust entrepreneurial activity, transferring unique skills and knowledge to their ancestral lands. Connecting with these topics and enthusiastically supporting the need for continued fostering of the diaspora-home country relationship, this article attempts to unveil somewhat less obvious, yet, essential, nuances of diaspora networks across a triangular dimension: identity, trust, and engagement infrastructure.

In any conversation on diaspora engagement, the reality is not as simple as it might appear at first. A country does not have an opportunity to pick and choose its diaspora. The fate of the home country is to engage with the full diversity of the diaspora network, no matter how loosely defined. But the diaspora, in all its multiplicity of unifying contradictions, does get a chance to choose a country [or region] to view as its own ancestral land. And so, it is from this dialectical knot one must begin to think about diaspora and home country engagement in economic development context.

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