The EU Urban Partnership on Inclusion: Institutionalizing Local

Abstract

In times when immigrant integration is considered both a highly salient political topic and a practical challenge by local, national, and European decision-makers, an analysis of the governance approach developed by the European Union (EU) Urban Partnership on Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees opens up new opportunities to advance research on migration studies’ “local turn.” In this IMR Dispatch from the Field, we argue that exploring the joint local-EU agenda-setting and cooperation in the Urban Partnership on Inclusion can refine understandings of multilevel governance. We argue that what is intriguing about the Urban Partnership on Inclusion for migration scholars is the institutionalization of local–supranational cooperation within an existing intergovernmental EU structure as a way to advance multilevel governance, even when the national level remains passive. Demonstrating the ways in which the Urban Partnership on Inclusion differs from city networks focused on questions of migration and integration, we show that the Urban Partnership on Inclusion offers a common structure to EU institutions and local authorities to coordinate agendas and actions, both from the local level upward and from the EU level downward while aiming to find ways around national passivity. Paying closer attention to such forms of institutionalized local–supranational governance developing within state-led structures, we suggest, can advance migration research and shed light on emerging local–supranational governance arrangements both at the European and the international levels.

Keywords

city diplomacy multilevel governance European Union

Introduction

In 2016, the European Union (EU) launched the Urban Agenda for the EU as a new multilevel working method that built on 12 thematic partnerships (European Commission 2016). The Urban Partnership on Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees was among its first pilot programs (Ibid.). Originally, the European Commission's Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO) had proposed the Partnership concept as a multilevel governance instrument bringing together local authorities, national governments, and EU institutions (Ibid.). However, over the course of four years, the Urban Partnership on Inclusion became, instead, a structure for direct cooperation between, on the one hand, Brussels-based actors such as the Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs (DG HOME), the European Investment Bank Group (EIB), and the city network Eurocities and, on the other, local authorities, migrants, and refugees. In this way, the Urban Partnership on Inclusion developed a certain potential to bypass the national level. This IMR Dispatch from the Field analyzes the Urban Partnership on Inclusion, in an effort to provide greater insight into a form of multilevel integration governance whose processes show three characteristics:

Governance processes are institutionalized within an intergovernmental EU structure;

Governance processes run upward from the local level to the EU level and downward from the EU level to the local level;

Governance processes serve to, at least partially, circumvent a national cooperation gap.

In the first section of this dispatch, we show how spotlighting the Urban Partnership on Inclusion can advance academic debates on the vertical dimension of migration studies’ “local turn,” which focuses on the interaction between local, national, and supranational authorities (Zapata-Barrero, Caponio, and Scholten 2017, 243). We argue that the Urban Partnership on Inclusion is difficult to grasp using existing “local turn” concepts, such as centralist, localist, and decoupled governance, but that the study of it can refine the concept of multilevel governance itself through a focus on parallel upward and downward mechanisms that partially skip the national level (Jorgensen 2012; Caponio and Jones-Correa 2018; Scholten et al. 2018). In the second part, we add substance to these theoretical reflections by differentiating the Urban Partnership on Inclusion from city networks and analyzing Partnership action resulting from (1) city representatives’ strong will to move toward outcome-oriented and pragmatic cooperation with EU institutions (upward cooperation); (2) EU representatives’ high interest in local policy reality checks (downward cooperation); and (3) national representatives’ passivity in the Partnership coordination (cooperation gap). Furthermore, we discuss the central limits of this form of local–supranational governance found within the Urban Partnership on Inclusion. In the concluding section, we summarize why this empirical development deserves more attention from migration scholars and offer some guidance for future research.

How to Theorize the Institutionalization of Local–Supranational Cooperation?

In the late 2000s, the growing engagement of local authorities and civil society in efforts to integrate migrants and refugees inspired migration scholars to rethink the dominant conceptualization of municipalities as spaces of migration (Caponio and Borkert 2010). Within this “local turn,” migration scholars began to approach local authorities and governments as collective actors of local integration governance (Caponio and Borkert 2010; Penninx et al. 2014; Fourot 2015; Scholten and Penninx 2016; Spencer and Delvino 2019). Although some scholars claim that local authorities are more welcoming and pragmatic than national governments when it comes to international migration (Schrover and Vermeulen 2005; Poppelaars and Scholten 2008), others criticize this generalization, highlighting passivity (Schammann et al. 2021) or even exclusionary policy-making at the local level (Mahnig 2004; Ambrosini 2013).

To refrain from replacing “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, 301) with methodological localism, a number of scholars have argued, migration studies must consider the nature and consequences of the interaction between different levels of government, or the lack thereof (Scholten and Penninx 2016; Filomeno 2017; Zapata-Barrero, Caponio, and Scholten 2017; Caponio, Scholten, and Zapata-Barrero 2018; Bazurli, Caponio, and de Graauw 2022). In the following, we apply Scholten’s (2013) theoretical distinction between centralist, localist, multilevel, and decoupled governance types to the Urban Partnership on Inclusion, demonstrating that none of the four types adequately capture the Urban Partnership's de-facto functioning.¹

Co-led by the European Commission's DG HOME and the city of Amsterdam, the Partnership's work has been structured by an Action Plan focusing on scalable local pilot projects and on recommendations to EU institutions and EU funds to take urban issues better into account (Urban Partnership Inclusion 2017). This local-EU agenda-setting and collaboration defy fundamental theoretical assumptions underlying localist (predominantly bottom-up) or centralist (predominantly top-down) types of governance (Scholten et al. 2018, 2013, 2014).

Could the Urban Partnership on Inclusion, therefore, be considered an instance of governance that is decoupled between local and national or supranational levels, as demonstrated by Oomen (2019), for European city networks? The fact that city representatives in Europe used the Partnership to develop pilot action on topics where national policies were considered harmful or insufficient could sway the argumentation in this direction. One Partnership pilot project, for instance, aimed at assisting unaccompanied young migrants beyond the legal threshold of coming of age (Heimann and Stürner 2020, 19). Although this pilot action may be considered an instance of local–national decoupling, due to the intention of local actors to go beyond national provisions, an evaluation of the Urban Partnership on Inclusion shows that cities and city networks explicitly did couple their agenda-setting and actions with those of EU actors such as DG HOME and the European Investment Bank Group (Ibid., 16–21).

The local-EU coordination might, therefore, be best captured by the concept of multilevel governance, as we can observe “vertical interaction between various government levels within a specific policy domain” (Scholten et al. 2018, 2014). However, as already suggested, national representatives’ passivity, despite their formal membership in the Partnership, runs counter to one of three multilevel governance criteria established by Caponio and Jones-Correa—namely, that “interaction should imply some degree of bargaining and negotiation among all of the involved institutions and actors” (2018, 1996).

The struggle of (some) local authorities and supranational organizations for solutions to migration-related challenges in the face of national passivity has been well researched in the last decades (e.g., Penninx et al. 2014; Scholten 2018). However, the case of the Urban Partnership on Inclusion is particularly intriguing, due to the institutionalization of local–supranational cooperation within the intergovernmental EU framework of the Pact of Amsterdam, which established the Urban Agenda for the EU (European Commission 2016). The Partnership as a structure to advance multilevel governance through upward (local to EU level) and downward (EU to local level) cooperation, even as the national level remains passive, is, in this way, quite unusual. Thus, we argue focusing on the Urban Partnership on Inclusion and similar instances of local–supranational governance within structures established by/for states, such as the Mayors Mechanism within the intergovernmental Global Forum on Migration and Development, may help migration scholars refine debates on vertical multilevel governance (e.g., Filomeno 2017; Zapata-Barrero, Caponio, and Scholten 2017).

What Is the EU Urban Partnership on Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees?

This IMR Dispatch is based on an evaluation of the EU Urban Partnership on Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees, conducted between May and September 2019 (Heimann and Stürner 2020). We undertook a comprehensive analysis of internal and public Partnership documents, conducted 14 expert interviews with Partnership members, held a focus-group discussion with all Partnership members, and asked them to complete a structured questionnaire.² Subsequently, we analyzed all material through structured qualitative content analysis (Mayring 2015).

Originally established within the framework of the Urban Agenda for the EU in 2016, the Urban Partnership on Inclusion can almost be considered to have developed a life of its own. This is best illustrated by the fact that in 2019, while DG REGIO was still pondering the Urban Agenda's future, the coordinators of the Urban Partnership on Inclusion went ahead and commissioned an evaluation of its working methods and outcomes, engaged in scenario-building workshops, raised funding, and began to implement a second Action Plan (Urban Partnership Inclusion 2019a). As the Urban Partnership on Inclusion was originally supposed to have run its course in 2018, we were especially interested to explore why representatives from the European Commission and European cities insisted on the Partnership's continuation. In this context, we also examined what cooperation opportunities the Partnership created that could not be provided by the Committee of the Regions (CoR) or European city networks.

To answer these questions, it is important to reiterate that the Urban Partnership on Inclusion is not a (horizontally oriented) city network and, thus, not simply another instance of city diplomacy in European integration governance. While the direct cooperation between EU institutions and city representatives may, at first glance, resemble the collaboration between Eurocities and the European Commission in the Integrating Cities projects or the role played by the Council of Europe (CoE) in the Intercultural Cities network (ICC), there are some important differences in the Urban Partnership.

First, although there are more and more city networks with mixed membership in a European context (Oomen 2019, 9), municipalities and their associations continue to form the core constituency of city networks and institutions, such as the CoR, ICC, or Integrating Cities (Ibid.). The Urban Partnership on Inclusion, however, brings together a range of actors, all interested in the inclusion of migrants and refugees in urban areas, but operating on different levels of governance (Urban Partnership on Inclusion 2017). For representatives of cities and city networks, such a coordination structure may be an opportunity to tackle the increasing fragmentation of the city diplomacy landscape (Fernández de Losada 2019, 25).

Second, cooperation between city representatives and EU institutions in existing initiatives is often limited to advocacy work, consultation, and funding and rarely reaches coordinated local-EU decision-making and agenda-setting (interviews Athens; Amsterdam; European Commission). For instance, Caponio (2019) highlights that the Intercultural Cities’ (ICC) agenda-setting is strongly shaped by the Council of Europe (CoE) and that relations between cities and the European Commission in the Integrating Cities Process “seem to be limited to funding and conferences, with no clear evidence of a partnership leading to coordinated decision-making” (Ibid., 14). By contrast, and as far as representatives of the participating cities of the Urban Partnership on Inclusion were concerned, the Partnership offered cities opportunities for both agenda-setting and developing direct and operational cooperation with EU actors in an institutionalized frame and over an extended time period (Heimann and Stürner 2020, 14–15, 29). The Urban Partnership on Inclusion is, thus, not a process that runs parallel to policy dialogues in Brussels but is, rather, directly embedded in the structure of the Urban Agenda for the EU, launched by the ministers of the EU member-states with the Pact of Amsterdam (European Commission 2016).

It is this institutionalization of the Urban Partnership on Inclusion within an existing intergovernmental EU framework that allows representatives from cities and EU institutions to move between the local and the supranational levels, even as the national level remains passive. To illustrate this central argument, we zoom in on upward and downward processes of cooperation in the absence of engagement by national representatives, as these can be seen in the Urban Partnership.

Upward Cooperation

City representatives’ strong will to move toward outcome-oriented, pragmatic agenda-setting and toward collaboration with EU institutions played an important role in fueling cooperation from the bottom-up (interviews Athens; Amsterdam; Berlin). Participating local authorities approached tasks within the Partnership much like their daily work at the municipal level: Cooperation needed to show results to explain to local constituents why the city was engaging at the EU level (Ibid.). Direct cooperation with EU institutions holding the right of initiative (European Commission) and legislation (European Parliament) enabled local authorities and city networks to strengthen municipal topics on the EU agenda (Heimann and Stürner 2020, 19). In collaboration with four Directorate-Generals of the European Commission (DG HOME, DG REGIO, DG EMPL, and DG BUDG) and the European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE), the city network Eurocities facilitated a Partnership Action leading to clear recommendations on improving municipal access to EU funding (Urban Partnership Inclusion 2019b). Developing and publishing these recommendations through a local-EU coalition of actors gave these proposals a weight and visibility that could not have been achieved by Eurocities or the CoR alone (interviews CoR; Eurocities). Equally important, being co-authored by local and EU actors made the recommendations important contributions to both the Commission's proposals on the next Multiannual Financial Framework and the LIBE Committee's report on the future Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) (Urban Partnership Inclusion 2019b).

Downward Cooperation

Representatives from EU institutions, such as the European Commission and the European Investment Bank Group, welcomed the face-to-face exchange with local authorities, migrants, and refugees within the Urban Partnership on Inclusion as an important policy reality check that also provided opportunities to directly follow-up with cooperative Partnership actions to address local challenges (interview European Commission; Stürner et al. 2020, 2). A study conducted within the Partnership's framework revealed, for instance, that local authorities had difficulties funding initiatives benefiting migrants, refugees, and local residents alike, often due to restrictive target group definitions in some EU funds and the need for local co-financing (Urban Partnership Inclusion 2019c). In response, the European Investment Bank Group collaborated with cities from inside and outside the Partnership to develop concepts for new Financial Blending Facilities. These instruments aimed at combining funding from the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) and the European Social Fund (ESF) with EIB Group loans provided to cities, financial institutions, or social impact funds to address long-term integration challenges (Ibid.).

Overall, the cooperation of a small but highly committed group of EU and local actors may be beneficial to developing policy recommendations and to piloting new approaches. Nevertheless, any institutional structure that includes municipal representatives from only a small number of cities risks overrepresenting their positions and contributing to further stratification of policies and practice on the ground (Garcia-Chueca 2019, 105). Between 2016 and 2019, Partnership members, thus, grew increasingly aware of the fact that broader legitimacy would be required for the Urban Partnership on Inclusion to lend more weight to Partnership recommendations, to scale up Partnership pilot programs, and to develop greater impact on EU policy-making (Heimann and Stürner 2020, 30–31).

National Cooperation gap

National representatives’ passivity in this governance structure presented a challenge, but also a window of opportunity, for unfiltered local-EU exchange as a basis for cooperation and agenda-setting on questions of migrant and refugee integration (Heimann and Stürner 2020). On the one hand, national passivity can be attributed to organizational difficulties when establishing this Partnership as one of the first pilot programs within the Urban Agenda. Rather than sending ministerial integration experts, member-states tended to delegate participation to personnel focusing more generally on urban affairs (Ibid., 22). On the other hand, national passivity may result from the fact that governments often remain hesitant to share their legal competence on matters of migration and integration with other actors in multigovernance settings (Stürner 2020, 38). In fact, none of the Partnership Actions were coordinated by EU member-states, even though the Partnership included the governments of Greece and Italy, to whom cooperative and solidarity-based solutions would have been highly relevant (Heimann and Stürner 2020, 22). We can, thus, observe governance processes within the EU Urban Partnership running upward from the local level to the EU level and downward from the EU level to the local level while, at least partially, circumventing a national cooperation gap.

Why Should Migration Scholars Take an Interest in These Developments?

Such local-EU cooperation may be a way to address a migration governance paradox cities in Europe (and worldwide) increasingly face: while cities are impacted by the consequences of migration movements and migration policies, local authorities have little to no voice in shaping supranational debates and policy-making affecting local realities (Stürner forthcoming). The Urban Partnership on Inclusion embodies an important step toward local authorities’ institutionalized inclusion in supranational integration governance. Certainly, national governments holding political mandates for migration and integration must remain part of such institutional innovation, but in the face of national or intergovernmental gridlocks, local–supranational governance cooperation may be able to provide transitional solutions showing the benefits of local authorities’ structural inclusion by bringing reality checks and pragmatic outcome-orientation into structures developed by/for states.

Similar instances of local–supranational governance are emerging at the international level. For example within the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD), where a Mayors Mechanism has been established in 2018, co-led by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the diplomacy-oriented Mayors Migration Council (MMC), and the city network United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG). As the Mayors Mechanism transforms the annual Global Mayoral Forum on Human Mobility, Migration and Development into an institutional part of the intergovernmental GFMD, the collaboration between IOM, the MMC, and UCLG brings representatives from local authorities directly into GFMD member-states’ spaces of negotiation and agenda-setting (Van Haasen 2020).

As this brief analysis of the Urban Partnership on Inclusion has demonstrated, there are opportunities, but also risks, connected with the institutionalization of local–supranational governance. Although new possibilities may emerge to tackle the migration governance paradox and overcome the increasing fragmentation of the city diplomacy landscape, questions of local representativeness and accountability must also be considered. After all, it is only a small number of (mostly) larger cities that are engaging on questions of migration and integration beyond the national level so far, and these cities cannot claim to represent cities in general, much less rural areas (Acuto 2019; Stürner 2020, 38–39). We, therefore, invite migration scholars, especially those interested in the “local turn,” to reflect on the risks and opportunities of institutionalizing local–supranational cooperation within existing intergovernmental structures as a way to advance multilevel governance, even in contexts of national passivity.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Stiftung Mercator.

ORCID iD

Janina Stürner-Siovitz

Notes

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The EU Urban Partnership on Inclusion: Institutionalizing Local–Supranational Integration Governance

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

How to Theorize the Institutionalization of Local–Supranational Cooperation?

What Is the EU Urban Partnership on Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees?

Upward Cooperation

Downward Cooperation

National Cooperation gap

Why Should Migration Scholars Take an Interest in These Developments?

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References