Refugee Settlement in a Decentralized Welfare State – From Soft Multi-Level Governance to Municipal Lobbying?

Authors: Jostein Askim and Anton Steen While contention over border control have dominated public discourses, the next governance shock has not yet fully hit European countries – the follow-on challenge of integrating into society those granted stay, i.e. settling refugees in local communities (OECD 2016). Many countries take an active role – especially those with expansive and universalistic welfare regimes. The Norwegian government work on the assumption that slow integration will be economically costly and create ethnic tensions, which might undermine popular support for existing welfare policies; therefore, state subsidies in refugee settlement is seen as a crucial means to promote quick local integration (NOU 2017:2; Valenta & Bunar, 2010; Brochman, 2002). The purpose of the paper is to explain the logic behind ‘mixed instruments’ in a unitary decentralized state. We ask 1) during a long period of pressure, why did the soft approach remain stable despite of poor results? 2) After the borders are closed and pressure reduced, what are the implications for governance and implementation? There are three basic forms of multi-level governance, market, network, and hierarchy (Powell, 1990). We discuss these instruments in light of key task characteristics of the case under study: local self-determination, diverging policy framing, goal inconsistencies, fluctuation in problem intensity, and policy salience. In central–local government relations, central government can solve its dependency on local governments by buying behaviour, drawing on “treasure” as a basic resource (Hood & Margetts 2007). In Norway, grants per capita refugee targeted at local governments exemplify this form of governance. The associated decision style is bargaining –appealing to the self-interests of all participants and resorting to economic incentives (Scharpf 1988). One expectation is that after the refugee crisis, the bargaining positions of central and local governments changed but local economic rationality remains important (Steen 2016). Because of heavy local ‘sunk costs’ and positive experiences from previous settlements a pressure for more future settlement may appear ‘bottom up’ with municipal lobbying as a new mechanism for bargaining settlement outcomes. Better than ‘network’ and ‘hierarchy’, a ‘market approach’ implying bargaining the numbers and prize of refugees, seems to explain how instruments influence failures and successes of state settlement policies. Data is from interviews with state and local officials, a survey among local governments, public documents and official statistics.