The project
The CASTLE 2 project is based on the understanding that migration simultaneously creates significant vulnerabilities and important opportunities for Bangladeshi labour migrants and their transnational families. Migrants often face high recruitment costs, risks of exploitation in their countries of origin, and fragmented support systems or administrative barriers in host countries such as Romania and Greece. At the same time, migration can provide access to essential resources, services, and protection mechanisms that support the well-being of migrants and their families.
CASTLE 2 aims to better understand how migrants and their families access and combine different forms of Hybrid Transnational Social Protection (HTSP)—a system that includes both formal mechanisms (such as public services and institutional programs) and informal sources of support (such as family networks, diasporic communities, and religious organisations).
Through comprehensive research, the project will:
- Identify key service providers—including public health institutions, legal aid offices, labour inspectorates, municipal welfare services, and local NGOs—that migrants and their families rely on or struggle to access. These findings will help determine which actors should be prioritised for awareness-raising, outreach, and training activities.
- Map protection gaps within migrants’ resource environments by examining both formal support systems (state services, employer schemes, bilateral programmes) and informal networks (family members, community organisations, and diaspora groups). Understanding these gaps will allow the project to strengthen weak links in existing protection structures.
- Analyse how different migration pathways—such as regular employment migration, irregular stays, or circular and seasonal migration—shape migrants’ access to protection and support. For example, migrants on temporary work visas may face legal restrictions that prevent them from changing employers even in exploitative conditions, while irregular migrants often rely almost entirely on informal networks.
The research findings will inform targeted interventions across the migration cycle, including:
- pre-migration support in Bangladesh,
- information and integration assistance for migrants in Romania and Greece, and
- capacity-building activities for local institutions and service providers working with migrant communities.
The project will also examine how different legal statuses, employment sectors, and geographic conditions influence migrants’ access to services and protection. By identifying which administrative structures and local services migrants most frequently encounter—or avoid—CASTLE 2 will engage the most relevant actors, such as labour offices, public hospitals, municipal welfare departments, and community organisations.
Innovation and Added Value
CASTLE 2 brings significant added value through its innovative research approach, strategic international partnership, and strong potential for replication across the EU migration context.
A central innovation of the project lies in its empirical application of the Hybrid Transnational Social Protection (HTSP) framework. Rather than viewing social protection solely through formal policy systems, the project examines how migrants actively combine formal and informal resources across borders to secure protection for themselves and their families.
The project also adopts a participatory research methodology, actively involving members of transnational families as co-research participants. This approach enables the project to generate deeper insights into the lived realities of migrants and their families, capturing the social dynamics and family responsibilities that are often overlooked in conventional policy frameworks.
Finally, the collaboration between Bangladesh, Romania, and Greece represents a unique transnational research partnership. By analysing how migrants and their families navigate protection systems across these interconnected contexts, CASTLE 2 contributes valuable knowledge for improving migrant support systems and informing future migration and social protection policies across Europe.
