Great Expectations, Ambiguous Goals and Multi-Level Governance – The Outcome Gap Re-Visited

Abstract

Scholars of public policy have long been haunted with challenges at the implementation stage. Ever since Pressman and Wildavsky’s seminal work in 1974, „Implementation. How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland”, research on implementation is characterized by a pessimistic undertone. Many case studies tell of the „horrors of war“ as Linder and Peters (1987) muse, of the lack of control, compliance and goal attainment. Scholars of migration policy-making in particular have been preoccupied with what they characterize as outcome gaps at the phase of implementation, often drawing from principal-agent-theory. More recently and optimistically, we have seen a revival to grasp the degree of discretion (and possibilities for control of discretion) of „street level bureaucracy“ or the role of nongovernment actors at this stage in the policy cycle. With the rise of incoming refugees since 2014, many comparative studies have documented the degree of regional and even local variations, sometimes circumventing sometimes openly challenging the implementation of migration legislation. Our panel brings together 4 papers that tackle challenges and ambiguities in implementation from very different angles and on different levels of governance: Starting from the top, we scrutinize how international organisations and NGOs step in and manage migration through their everyday professional routines and practices in the face of limited formal international governance of migration; shed light on how internal migration control policies by subnational state actors (re-)produce or mediate legal uncertainty for asylum-seekers; present the organizational implementation of German Refugee Legislation at the local level from a Human Security Perspective and discuss the cross-sectoral collaboration for refugee integration at the local level.