Coping with Migrants and Refugees

Multilevel Governance across the EU

Tiziana Caponio, Irene Ponzo, Tiziana Caponio, Irene Ponzo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367655228
• eBook ISBN: 9781000563177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a comparative overview of asylum seekers' reception throughout Europe by adopting a theoretical framework based on an analytical approach to the notion of multilevel governance (MLG).

It challenges the tendency of the MLG literature to overlook political controversies and conflicts and questions the assumption that it represents the best policymaking arrangement for promoting policy convergence. In doing so, it explores the functioning of the reception component of the Common European Asylum System in centralised states and federal/regional states and analyses its implementation at both national and local levels. The book reveals the heterogeneous development of reception policies not only across Member States but also within each country where solutions adopted at the local level generally diverge substantially. Furthermore, the overall centralisation of policy-making on reception regardless the institutional structure, seems to leave little room for MLG arrangements tailored to specific localities and triggers tensions between central governments and local authorities.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of migration and asylum studies, immigration, (multilevel) global governance and more broadly to comparative politics, European studies/politics and public policy.

Chapter 3, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1IntroductionAn analytical approach to the multilevel governance of asylum seekers’ reception policies

Tiziana Caponio

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003129950-1

Introduction

The debate on the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) is highly politicised, representing a major challenge for the European Parliament elected in May 2019 and for the Commission of Ursula Van Der Leyen appointed on December 1, 2019. Disputes between different levels of government (namely the European Union (EU), national and local authorities) on the poor implementation and functioning of CEAS at a grassroots level have been inflaming political debates, with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international organisations denouncing the lack of protection of the rights of asylum seekers and refugees, especially in extreme situations such as those of the Greek islands. This gloomy picture notwithstanding, empirical studies on the implementation of CEAS are still lacking.

Existing research has primarily taken two specular approaches: a legal perspective, aimed at assessing the degree of legislative harmonisation across EU countries vis-à-vis the EU Directives constituting the CEAS; and a local-practices approach, looking more closely at the initiatives carried out at a grassroots level by public officials, bureaucrats and NGOs practitioners at different stages of the asylum process (at borders, in reception facilities, etc). While both these perspectives are indeed important in illuminating various aspects of asylum policies, a major gap is represented by the lack of systematic mid-range analyses of what happens in between “harmonised” legislative provisions and grassroots practices. Such a gap has become even more evident since the late 2010s and in the context of the outbreak of the so called “refugee crisis” of 2015, when CEAS had to face an unprecedented inflow of asylum seekers in almost all European member countries (see Glorius and Doomernik 2020).

This book aims to fill this gap and advance our knowledge of the implementation processes of highly contested asylum reception policies by taking a multilevel governance (MLG) perspective. More specifically, the book analyses how asylum seekers’ reception policies have been concretely implemented in European member states characterised by different institutional settings, i.e., unitary and federalist/regionalist state-structures, and where the asylum issue has assumed different degrees of urgency and political saliency.

According to policy studies and public management literature, MLG policy-making arrangements are key to successfully addressing and managing complex and multifaceted challenges (Agranoff 2018). By bringing together all of the concerned public and non-public actors, the expectation is that non-hierarchical and cooperative types of relations will develop with the goal of contributing to solving the issues on the ground. In the long run, these processes should lead to coordination and policy convergence. However, these arguments appear to overlook the political implications linked to the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees. In this respect, migration policy, and even more so asylum, can be considered least-likely cases for MLG: while it is true that since the 1990s, states have shifted responsibilities upwards to supranational entities like the EU, downwards to local authorities and outwards to private actors and NGOs (Guiraudon and Lahav 2000), states remain reluctant to share their power or undertake collaborative relations. If MLG sounds in principle like a more promising approach to facing the complexity of asylum challenges, the role of power and hierarchical relations in shaping the concrete implementation of CEAS in different EU countries should nevertheless be duly considered and accounted for.

Hence, in this book, in applying the MLG perspective to the analysis of asylum seekers’ reception policies, we take an analytical approach. MLG as a heuristic concept, while promising in many respects, needs to be integrated into a broader conceptualisation of the multilevel political dynamics underlying policy-making processes on highly politicised issues such as migration and asylum. The goal of this introduction is precisely to provide analytical and theoretical framework underlying the empirical chapters of this book on the implementation of asylum seekers’ reception policies in Spain, Italy, Germany, Greece and Finland.

To this end, in the first section, I discuss the definition of the research object, i.e., asylum seekers’ reception policies. As we shall see, on the one hand, legal definitions such as those provided by the CEAS legislation are quite general and leave to states considerable discretion in their interpretation of exactly what kind of policy should be pursued. On the other hand, the scientific literature has only recently thematised the issue of reception and primarily with respect to accommodation. This study, adopts an open-ended definition, in the sense that we aim to understand the meanings that reception policy can concretely assume in different national contexts. Then, in the second section, after a brief review of the literature on the concept of MLG, I present an analytical framework for the analysis of multilevel political dynamics in the field of asylum reception policy and formulate hypotheses on the factors and mechanisms that can lead to the emergence of MLG-like policy-making arrangements on highly politicised issue. The third section describes the research design and methodology. Finally, in the fourth section, the contents of the chapters are presented.

Asylum seekers’ reception policies: an open-ended definition

As mentioned above, the issue of asylum seekers’ reception has been poorly defined by international asylum law. The 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, which still represents landmark legislation in determining who is a refugee (refugee definition or inclusion clause, Article 1 A) and the rights of individuals who are granted asylum, offers little guidance on the concrete standards and material conditions of reception. In 2001, the UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency) attempted to fill this gap by providing the following definition of “reception standards:”

“Reception Standards” refers to a set of measures related to the treatment of asylum seekers from the time they make their claims either in-country or at the border, including the airport or sea port, until either a transfer is affected to the State deemed to be responsible for the examination of their claims or a final decision is taken as regards the substance of the claims. These measures range from adequate reception conditions upon arrival at the border, access to legal counselling, freedom of movement, accommodation, and adequate means of subsistence to access to education, medical care and employment. Special arrangements are necessary to cover the specific needs of children, women and elderly asylum seekers.

(UNHCR 2001, 3)

According to this definition, reception measures are linked to the juridical status of the asylum seeker, and limited to the time between arrival in the asylum country and the issuing of a final decision. Reception should ensure fair and humane treatment to asylum seekers while in the process of determining their refugee status. To this end, the ranges of measures listed by UNHCR clearly goes beyond first help and immediate assistance, and includes classical integration measures like access to education and employment.

In fact, the—often implicit—link between asylum seekers’ reception and integration has underpinned political discourses around asylum policy in Europe since the 1980s (Boswell and Geddes 2011). Expressions like “asylum shopping” or “bogus asylum seekers” disclose the belief that prospective refugees would be able to compare and weigh the benefits of different destinations in terms of services and provisions accorded to asylum seekers. The high discretion traditionally enjoyed by EU member states in forging reception measures has led—in the context of recurrent asylum crises—to the emergence of a debate on “harmonisation,” reflecting the political will of more generous asylum countries like Germany, to remove unequal pull factors in relation to both core destinations and patterns of secondary migration (Sigona 2010, 116).

In this context, article 63 of the Treaty of Amsterdam (1998), which laid down the legal basis of the so-called CEAS, explicitly envisaged the approbation of minimum standards for the reception of asylum seekers. The Reception Directive (2003/9/EC) approved in 2003 and then reformed in 2013 (Recast Reception Directive 2013/33/EU) has the explicit goal of ensuring that asylum seekers retain “a dignified standard of living and comparable living conditions in all Member States” (par. 7). To this end, the Directive specifies that “material reception conditions’ should include measures such as housing, food and clothing provided in kind, or as financial allowances or in vouchers, or a combination of the three, and a daily expenses allowance” (par. g article 2). This baseline set of services should ensure “an adequate standard of living for applicants, which guarantees their subsistence and protects their physical and mental health” (article 17). However, member states can make access to material reception subject to conditions of mandatory residence (article 20) and insufficient means (article 17). Article 14 stipulates that “Member States shall grant to minor children and to applicants who are minors access to the education system under similar conditions as their own nationals;” while article 15 requests that member states “ensure that applicants have access to the labour market no later than 9 months from the date when the application for international protection was lodged if a first instance decision by the competent authority has not been taken.” Hence, while states still retain considerable discretion in determining how to concretely organise and provide specific services (see e.g. article 18 on housing), the Reception Directive includes minimum conditions concerning integration in terms of access to education for minors and access to employment and vocational training.

In this book, following the approach underlying the EU Reception Directive, we do not adopt a rigid definition of reception; rather we leave it open to better reflect the different meanings that reception can assume in different national contexts in terms of the type of services and provisions delivered to asylum seekers. This open-ended approach enables us to also explore the blurred boundaries with integration provisions, which emerge as particularly relevant in processes of implementation of asylum seekers’ reception policies at the local level. In fact, existing research on reception practices in specific local contexts seems to indicate the limits of policies that simply provide material assistance like accommodation in collective structures (see Bassi 2019; Bock 2018), while emphasising the need for more innovative approaches based on smaller housing units, interaction with the receiving community, access to employment and voluntary service and language training (see Geuijen, Oliver and Dekker 2020). Thus, asylum seekers’ reception emerges as a complex policy field, linking together ad hoc, specific services with more general policies regarding migrants’ integration and access to citizenship, social assistance, schooling for children, housing for disadvantaged groups, etc.

The analytical framework: multilevel policy-making dynamics and policy convergence

Given the complexity of reception policy and its overlap with other issues, especially in the field of social policy, we can easily expect complex policy-making processes to take place, characterised by the involvement and participation of different public and non-public actors. From a descriptive point of view, asylum seekers’ reception is a classic MLG challenge, i.e., one that brings a multiplicity of interdependent actors into play, questioning state-based hierarchical implementation processes. In the section below, I define the concept of MLG and develop a comprehensive analytical framework to analyse the multilevel policy-making of reception policy and its outcomes.

The “what” question: defining MLG

In the policy studies literature, the concept of MLG is used in two different manners (see Scholten et al. 2018): as a general, descriptive notion indicating processes of state authority dispersion across different levels of government and/or non-state actors; and as a specific configuration of multilevel policy processes, with distinctive features vis-à-vis other possible modes of governance. The use of the MLG label in an unspecified manner has generated considerable confusion, leading critics to simply dismiss the usefulness of the concept altogether. According to Peters and Pierre (2004, 88), “while multilevel governance has the virtue of being capable of being invoked in almost any situation, that is also its great problem. Any complex and multifaceted political process can be referred to as multilevel governance.”

To avoid such a risk, existing state-of-the-art reviews (see Alcantara and Nelles 2014; Piattoni 2010; Tortola 2017) propose a strategy of conceptual shrinking. Whereas some scholars argue for the necessity of getting back to the roots of EU integration theory (Tortola 2017), others have gone in the opposite direction by suggesting a definition of MLG as a specific configuration or instance of policy-making that can be empirically detected in different political and institutional systems. More specifically, according to Alcantara, Broschek and Nelles (2016, 69), whereas studies on European integration and federalism consider MLG to be a new system of policy-making relations characterised by the dispersion of state authority “across interdependent, and yet autonomous, public authorities and non-public organisations placed at different levels of government” (Hooghe and Marks 2001, 11), public policy scholars conceive of it in much narrower terms as a specific instance or structure of policy-making. As such, MLG interactions coexist with other possible instances of policy-making, the top-down traditional hierarchy included.

Starting from the assumption that policy-making processes in multilevel political systems are shaped by interactions taking place between different governmental authorities (vertical dimension of policy-making) and/or between public and non-public actors (horizontal dimension), and that such interactions can be marked by different degrees o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: An analytical approach to the multilevel governance of asylum seekers’ reception policies
• 2 Making sense of EU reception policies in the midst of the crisis: The Partnership for the Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees as a case of multilevel governance policy-making
• 3 Reforms of asylum seekers’ reception during the 2010s: Driving factors and multilevel governance arrangements
• 4 Multilevel policy-making of refugee reception policies in Spain
• 5 The variance in multilevel governance of asylum seekers’ reception in Italy: The key roles of policy legacy, politics and civil society
• 6 The multilevel governance of asylum seekers’ reception in Germany and the role of the local level: A local-to-local comparison
• 7 The gradual emergence of a Greek reception system amidst multiple “crises”
• 8 The Finnish reception system and a local perspective on integration
• 9 Multilevel governance of the “refugee crisis” in Germany: A chronological analysis of governance approaches and implementation outcomes
• 10 Conclusion: Multilevel governance between centralisation and local agency
• Index