Migration governance increasingly involves interactions among state, subnational, international, and humanitarian actors, yet less attention has been paid to how institutional fragmentation itself shapes collaboration. This study examines how institutional fragmentation influences collaborative immigrant governance in Makassar, Indonesia, with an empirical focus on refugees and asylum seekers. Using a qualitative documentary case-study design, the study analyzes regulations, official government documents, UNHCR and IOM reports, humanitarian sources, and verified media published between 2016 and 2026. The documents were thematically coded to identify the distribution of mandates, authority, resources, operational responsibilities, and inter-organizational relationships. The coded data were then processed using Python to construct an institutional matrix and a document-based Collaborative Governance Network. The findings reveal that responsibility, authority, and resources are distributed across different institutional domains, producing organizational incompleteness and institutional interdependence. This condition generates recurrent collaboration among immigration authorities, local government, UNHCR, IOM, and sectoral actors. However, collaboration remains functionally differentiated and institutionally asymmetric, creating collaborative activity without fully consolidating collaborative governance capacity. The study conceptualizes this condition as the Fragmentation–Collaboration Paradox, in which fragmentation simultaneously creates the need for collaboration and preserves the institutional asymmetries that constrain deeper integration.
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