Abstract
This article addresses one of the key challenges facing transitional and emerging economies: managing ruralurban migration to tackle rural decline and the associated rapid urbanisation.We introduce New Institutionalism as a novel conceptual framework to analyse the interactions between the institutional environment and migrant agency in a rural-urban system: the Akmola-Astana migration system in northern Kazakhstan.Our results suggest that the government might be more successful if it engages migrant agency and incentivises remaining in rural areas instead of designing policies to discourage ruralurban migration.THE 2020 WORLD MIGRATION REPORT CONFIRMED THE Global trend for more internal than international migrants: 763 million internal migrants compared to 272 million international migrants (IOM 2019, p. 19).Despite the prevalence of internal migration, the migration literature has disproportionately focused on the dynamics of international migration, with 'migration' often discussed synonymously with 'international migration' (King & Skeldon 2010, p. 1620).International and internal migration processes are interrelated and caused by similar social, economic and political transformations.Moreover, internal migration often occurs before international migration.Thus, there have been calls to refocus attention on the study of internal migration (Ellis 2012, pp.196, 197).This article aims to do just that by introducing and applying a new conceptual framework based on New Institutionalism