Migration Policy in Multilevel Political Settings. City Network in Europe and North America

Project Information

MInMUS

Grant agreement ID: 794012

DOI

10.3030/794012

Project closed

EC signature date 20 April 2018

Start date 1 September 2018

End date 31 August 2020

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 172 477,20

EU contribution

€ 172 477,20

Coordinated by

EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MInMUS (Migration Policy in Multilevel Political Settings. City Network in Europe and North America)

Reporting period: 2018-09-01 to 2020-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

MInMUS has addressed the still undexplored nexus between City Network (CN) organisations and multilevel governance (MLG) policymaking on the highly topical migration issue. Migration represents a typical matter of national sovereignty on which states have always been reluctant to share power with either local or supra-national authorities. It can be considered a least-likely case for MLG. Nevertheless, in the early 2000s migration CNs have been established in various multi-level political systems. MInMUS has investigated this puzzle in the European Union supranational system and the Unitied States federal polity.
MInMUS contributes towards European policy objectives and provides useful insights for policymaking on migration issues in three ways. First, it contributes to a more in-depth understanding of the role of cities in the global governance of migration. Second, it sheds light on how multilevel governance on contentious migration issues is actually built, providing a realistic assessment of both potentialities and limits of MLG-policymaking arrangements. Third, it sets the basis for a re-thinking of the modes of migration governance prevailing in the EU system, which appear still too much focused on member states and take poorly into account the multifaceted needs of local communities.
To this end, MinMUS has pursued three key objectives:
1) To expand the state of knowledge about urban international networking on the highly topical migration issue by considering European and North American experiences at the same time;
2) To contribute to the theorising of migration policy in multilevel political settings by bringing research on migration policy into conversation with the multidisciplinary field of studies on cities’ international networking and with political science literature on MLG;
3) To influence ‘real world’ migration policy by directly engaging with the main stakeholders of the research action in a reflexive dialogue on the role of cities and their networks in migration policymaking.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

To achieve the three objectives above I have carried out a multiplicity of research actions and outreach initiatives.
With respect to objective (1), I have undertaken desk research on existing literature and available online sources. The results of this mapping of the field can be found in the MPC Working Paper: City Networks and the Multilevel governance of migration. Policy discourses and practices (https://cadmus.eui.eu//handle/1814/60666).
To achieve objective (2), intense qualitative research has been carried out, implying: 1) the building of a corpus of 235 CNs official documents that have been analysed with Atlas.ti software following a concept-driven logic; 2) field visits to meet CNs leaders and other key informants, collect in-depth interviews and make ethnographic observations of CNs’ events and conferences. I have engaged in workshops and discussions as rapporteur or facilitator, a position that has enabled me to interact with staff officers and city leaders, and to engage in a reflexive dialogue on CNs practices and initiatives which at the very core of objective (3).
The key results and findings of the intense research activities described above will be published in the book monography Making Sense of the Multilevel Governance of Migration. City Networks facing global mobility challenges, under contract with Palgrave McMillan and currently in progress. Furthermore, three scientific articles have been submitted to leading international Journals (currently under review). An expanded version of the first article, written together with Anthony Clément of the University of Lyon, is forthcoming as MPC Working Paper: Immigration, international mobilization and local governance in post-industrial cities: Turin and Saint-Etienne compared.
Along with scientific publications, research results have been communicated through blogposts on the MPC Blog:
1) If Mayors Ruled Migration: Promises and Gaps, May 26th 2019, https://blogs.eui.eu/migrationpolicycentre/mayors-ruled-migration-promises-gaps/.
2) The Smaller the Better? Migration Governance in Small and Medium-sized Towns and rural areas in times of crisis, June 25th 2020, https://blogs.eui.eu/migrationpolicycentre/migration-governance-small-medium-sized-towns-rural-areas-crises/
A third blogpost will be published in early January 2021, to build momentum around the publication of the research monography. Blogposts have been extremely important in order to reach a broad public and offer to policymakers key takeaways for engagement in reflexive dialogues. A case in point is the event ‘What if Mayors Ruled Migration?’, organised together with Ilke Adam (VUB) as a conversation between academic researchers, i.e. besides me, also Eric Corijn, of the Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Studies at VUB, and two Mayors, i.e. Mohammed Ridouani, Mayor of Leuven, and Wim Dries, Mayor of Genk. The event, took place at Perspective Brusselson 12th December 2019.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The MInMUS project contributes to innovate current debates on the local dimension of migration policy and policymaking by engaging in a systematic investigation of city networking initiatives on migration issues. It innovates beyond the state of the art in three respects: 1) theoretically, by advancing a new critical framework for the understanding of CNs engagement in MLG policymaking; 2) methodologically, by combining qualitative in-depth research methods such as discourse analysis and process-tracing, with quantitative techniques like social networks analysis; 3) empirically, by offering an overview and in-depth investigation of CNs initiatives on migration in Europe and the US.
The final monograph, Making Sense of the Multilevel Governance of Migration. City Networks facing global mobility challenges (Palgrave McMillan, forthcoming), as well as the three peer-reviewed articles result of the project, will make an important contribution to the progress of scientific research on MLG policymaking. So far, studies have focused on the environmental policy field and on economic development, yet have completely neglected highly pitched political issues like migration. MInMUS research results indicate that MLG in the migration policy field takes place in the ‘shadow of hierarchy’ and is strongly influenced by the interests and willingness of national governments to engage in dialogues with CNs and other civil society stakeholders. The original transatlantic, EU-US comparative perspective, reinforces such results by overcoming the Eurocentric bias of much research on MLG.
However, this does not mean that CNs are simply spectators of quintessentially state-led migration policy. MInMUS allows for a more critical and reflexive appreciation of the role of CNs in migration policymaking, to realistically assess potential and limits. Both at a transnational and community level, CNs emerge as key laboratories of innovative ideas that, in times of heightened migration policy crisis, can put pressure from below for the starting of new experiments of MLG policymaking.

talk in Brussles