Cross-border flows of people, goods and capital, consistent with neo-liberal doctrine and increased integration of economies, are fundamental features of economic globalisation. However, while trade and investment flows are welcomed by nations, immigration is a contentious issue, particularly in western democracies, but also in the Asia-Pacific. There are currently about 200 million international migrants, of whom about 90 per cent are migrant workers. Mixed migration movements (refugees and displaced persons) and forced migration and human trafficking is also on the rise. For most governments, migration is increasingly seen to undermine border control systems and is related to security threats and terrorism. Increasing population diversity also raises questions about national identity and citizenship while transnational connections are viewed as unfavourable to nation-state sovereignty.
Effective governance of labour migration depends more on interstate cooperation and transnational networks rather than international institutions such as UNCHR or the ILO alone. Human rights and human welfare should be the main priority since the guest worker program is increasingly seen as the optimal solution to fill labour market gaps. The contracts offered to foreign workers are typically short-term, and include a range of restrictions: the majority of workers must return to their home country when their contract is completed; they are not permitted to seek employment elsewhere; they are they allowed to have their families accompany them; and they cannot settle in the country. Most migrant workers are also locked into exploitative labour conditions and the ever-increasing drive for higher profits has encouraged use of undocumented or irregular labour and promoted human trafficking.  Meanwhile, political leaders zealously seek to control mobility through evolving border control regimes, more border fences, and tougher legislation.
Professor Amarjit Kaur’s main research is centred on transnational labor movements; theoretical frameworks to illuminate historical analysis and enhance transnational approaches to migration issues; and research on (and involvement in) NGO activities, focussing on women domestic workers, refugees and trafficked persons. (See http://www.une.edu.au/about/research/asiapacificregion/migration.php).
Amarjit has international collaborative links in Asia, Australia and Europe and her research has been supported by a variety of funding agencies, including the Australian Research Council, AusAID, the Toyota and Japan Foundations, the British Academy, the International Institute of Social History and the Wellcome Trust. Amarjit has also served on an AusAID Technical Assessment Panel for selection of tenders for the Asia Regional Trafficking In Persons Project, and was a participant in the Asia-Pacific Roundtable World Bank/UNDP Regional Consultation on the Global Human Development Report 2009.
Amarjit is currently supervising six doctoral students researching on international migration in the Asia-Pacific (labour migration, human trafficking; refugees). She is also involved in organising three panels on “A global perspective on continuities and discontinuities in 19th- and 20th-century mass migration systems” with American, European, Asian and Australian colleagues for the 21st International Congress of Historical Sciences in Amsterdam (2010) and a joint UNE and University of Singapore Workshop on “Safe Migration Channels for Women Migrants” in November 2010.

UNE’s Centre for Local Government, headed by Professor Brian Dollery, has recently undertaken extensive research into the devolution of political and economic authority, in particular the ‘place-shaping’ approach developed in England by the Lyons Inquiry into local government reform.
There is a strong global trend toward the devolution of both political and fiscal authority across developed and developing economies. The World Bank has endorsed and labelled this trend Local Economic Development (LED) However, unlike the 1980s and 1990s, where devolution was initiated and sponsored by parastatals (quasi-governmental organizations, corporations, businesses, and NGOs) current trends see devolution to municipal, elected authorities.

This global trend to devolution, and importantly a strong role for leadership within this, is exemplified by the idea of ‘place-shaping’, which gives centre-stage to the significance of ‘place’, especially in conditions of economic and social marginality. Place-shaping is supported at both the theoretical and moral levels by a number of ideas in contemporary thinking in social science, but, most importantly, the over-arching goal of continued economic growth and prosperity, particularly outside the metropolitan centres.

As an appealing amalgam of important empirical and normative trends, place-shaping is a powerful basis for contemporary policy formulation. More specifically, it involves:

• Increased powers for generating income at the local level;
• Articulating a strong idea of local identity and local ‘sense of place’ in particular economic identity and where a community will be in the future – inclusive of environmental sustainability;
• The encouragement of partnerships (with both private enterprise and community-based groups) for service delivery such as aged care; and
• An emphasis on the idea of leadership, both political and administrative.

The idea of place-shaping is immediately relevant and offers the possibility of exploring council-led economic development and regional resurgence, rather than seeing the regions as recipients acts of largesse on the part of state and federal government agencies with occasional peaks of (seasonally dependant) prosperity.
More importantly, it also offers the possibility of re-defining what is meant by prosperity, aligned with the ethical and moral imperatives of our times – environmental sustainability, community sustainability, and also democratic sustainability – something which is usually neglected in contemporary discussions of local and regional development.
Members of the UNE Centre for Local Government have published a series of articles addressing place-shaping at both theoretical and practical levels, focussing in particular on the New England/North-West region. To some extent our communities already engage in ‘place-shaping’ by branding themselves on the basis of their history/identity/difference as a form of marketing, such as – Glen Innes as ‘Celtic Country’, Tamworth as the ‘Country Music Capital’, Walcha as an ‘Open Air Gallery’ and so on. In all of these instances, councils work in close partnership with business. Further projects will continue to address this series of questions, working in partnership with these communities.