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The Digital turn to public service provision to migrants and asylum seekers during Covid-19: a coordinative Europeanisation approach to civic humanitarian duty

Europe (Central and Eastern)
Green Politics
Europeanisation through Law
EU7
Nathalie Brack
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Jonathan Zeitlin
University of Amsterdam

Thursday 15:00 - 16:30 GMT (16/03/2023)

Abstract

Speakers: Sarah Wolff, Queen Mary University of London Federica Zardo, University of Krems Discussant Leila Hadj-Abdou, EUI EU asylum and migration policies are bound by a lack of coordination as illustrated by the quasi absence of major policy reform since 2013 in the Common European Asylum Support System. Yet the pandemic has been marked by a digital turn in the provision of public services to migrants and asylum. While a few initiatives were in place before the pandemic, the impossibility of administrations to be in contact with vulnerable populations, awaiting for crucial administrative decisions, has led European administrations to accelerate the digital turn especially at the municipality level. Through the comparative analysis of four European cities (Paris, Palermo, Malaga and Larissa), we show that of a coordinative discourse on humanitarian civic duty in Europe emerged and characterized all the processes studied. Coordinative Europeanization, however, unfolded in varying ways in the different cities. In France and Greece (Paris and Larissa), digitalization initiatives were predominantly centralized, with the discourse of humanitarian duty serving the objective of coordinating sub-national and sub-local actors (public administration and civil society) to implement the national strategies. In Italy and Spain, on the other hand, we discerned a stronger impetus at the sub-national level, a bottom-up process that gained momentum through inter-crisis learning, and by mobilizing the EU as a legitimizing actor in their endeavors.