Refugee Reception within a common European asylum system: looking at convergences and divergences through a local-to-local comparison

Abstract

Research on the governance of refugees has until recently remained conceptualized with the national perspective as a starting point. This article compares asylum governance at the local level between Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, focusing on the often sensitive and highly debated issue of reception and accommodation. The central idea is to determine convergences and divergences of local reception structures and efforts, and how they are linked to the governance levels situated above them. Despite municipalities having been greatly affected by, and having shaped in practice, reception and integration processes of asylum seekers and refugees, so far there has been little in terms of comparative research across countries in Europe. Our findings emerging from the comparison suggest that top-down implementations of asylum reception have created numerous problems and protest on the ground, especially when the local population and local stakeholders were not involved in the decision-making process. On the one hand, the case studies show that within each national setting, the local regimes and agencies can shape divergent reception outcomes in terms of integrative or disintegrative policies. On the other hand, converging developments in the local cases across national contexts, such as the impact of the local political climate, suggest the crucial impact of local reception regimes and agencies, notwithstanding varying regulatory frameworks and procedures. We thus underline the importance of local-to-local comparison, and not only national-to-national, when it comes to analysing refugee reception. Zusammenfassung: Forschungen zur Implementierung von Asylpolitik verbleiben meist auf der nationalen Betrachtungsebene. Dieser Artikel nimmt einen lokalen Fokus ein, um Aufnahmepolitiken von Asylsuchenden in Deutschland, Luxemburg und den Niederlanden zu vergleichen. Der Beitrag hat zum Ziel, konvergierende und divergierende Strategien, Praktiken und Effekte zu identifizieren und die Verbindungen zu den übergeordneten Politikebenen zu analysieren. Obgleich die kommunale Ebene ganz wesentlich die Aufnahme von Asylsuchenden verantwortet und individuelle Aufnahme-und Integrationspraktiken entwickelt, gibt es dazu bislang kaum länderübergreifende vergleichende Forschung. Die Befunde unserer vergleichenden Lokalforschung zeigen, dass die zentrale Steuerung der Aufnahme Asylsuchender auf kommunaler Ebene verschiedene Probleme und Protesthaltungen erzeugt hat, insbesondere wenn die Bevölkerung und die Entscheidungsträger vor Ort nicht in den Entscheidungsprozess einbezogen wurden. Es zeigt sich, dass innerhalb des identischen nationalen Rahmens Aufnahmepolitiken höchst unterschiedliche Resultate zeitigen können, z.B. durch die Implementierung integrativer oder partikularer Politikansätze. Andererseits weisen konvergierende Entwicklungen in unseren Fallbeispielen auf die Bedeutung lokaler Aushandlungsprozesse und Diskurse hin, die sich trotz unterschiedlicher nationaler Regulierungen und Rahmenbedingungen in vergleichbarer We...

Becoming glocal bureaucrats: mayors, institutions and civil society in smaller cities in Brandenburg during the ‘migration crisis’, 2015–17

“…It was a task that was better accomplished through constant and resourceful democratic support than through top-down leadership. Here our research is in line with what has been reported by recent studies on the role of municipalities in Europe: formal and informal hierarchies were re-established and the role of civil society actors was crucial (Bendel et al, 2019;Glorius et al, 2019). Even more, our research on the eight cities indicates that a strong mayor figure is only productive for urban society in a situation of acute crisis.…”

“…The proponents of the 'local turn' literature took seriously the difficulties of generalizing research findings in these multilevel constellations and pointed to the importance of local in-depth studies (Zapata-Barrero et al, 2017). These would be able to reveal, for example, the bypassing of actors (such as the mayor) within formal and informal local hierarchies (Glorius et al, 2019). Some researchers now also started to concentrate on the role of the mayor as crucial to understanding overall local policies (Glorius et al, 2016;Haselbacher, 2019).…”

Platformization in the third sector

“…First, the local and regional authorities appeared to be unprepared for this sudden influx of newcomers and struggled to find the capacity and resources to manage the reception and integration of refugees. While the federal office Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (BAMF) is occupied with asylum procedures, regional and local authorities are responsible for the provision of housing, education and care (Glorius et al 2019 ). In 2015, the incapacity of local authorities became visible, for example, in the endless queues forming in front of the regional authority Landesamt für Gesundheit und Soziales, as well as the ‘emergency accommodations’ on the Tempelhofer field.…”

Preface: Postmigrant city? Urban migration societies as a starting point for a normative-critical reorientation in urban studies

“…The increased immigration in response to causes of flight between 2014 and 2016 has generated a number of studies with a particular focus on the arrival of people with flight biographies and the way they were dealt with and perceived in specific local contexts of the Federal Republic of Germany (including Hamann and Yurdakul, 2018;Glorius et al, 2019;Kurtenbach, 2019). Acknowledging globalised conditions and in the sense of the postmigrant point of view, however, refugee migration is to be regarded less as an exception but rather to be accepted as a status that -due to worldwide economic disparities and political power imbalances -is always an element of global mobility processes.…”