Service providers in Western welfare states have to engage with an increasingly differentiated citizenry. The arrival of new migrant communities triggers debates, negotiations and struggles over the needs of these communities and how service providers can engage with them. In this paper, we look at these processes of developing local social inclusion policies that target migrant communities through the perspective of Nancy Fraser's ‘politics of need interpretation’. More specifically, we analyse Roma engagement strategies in Manchester. We do so by reconstructing how the presence of Romanian Roma emerged as a public issue leading to various engagement strategies and how different actors competed over the interpretation of the needs of the Roma community and the best ways to respond to them. We use Fraser's notion of ‘parity of participation’ to draw attention to the position of the Roma community itself in the process of interpreting needs.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The increase in migration flows within and into Europe has been accompanied by a growing policy focus on migration management. As in any policy debate, actors mobilise both factual claims and assumptions about the problems to be tackled and the population groups involved, in turn fashioning narratives that shape concrete policies. The article focuses on the policy narratives that developed in the UK around the migration of Roma groups between 2009 and 2014. I will show how the mobilisation of narratives on the criminal nature of Roma migration and about a sudden influx of Roma matched stereotypical images about the ‘Gypsies’. This made both narratives convincing as they fitted expectations about the Roma, to the point that their weak factual basis was ignored. This, in turn, contributed to refocusing the UK debate on migration from the need to reform the benefit system, to the need to reduce migration overall and eventually challenging the EU principle of freedom of movement. I will highlight the role of scholarly research in contributing to the development of policy narratives, calling for scholars to avoid sensationalising our findings, even if this is seen as an attempt to gain support for inclusive migration policies.