Sub-National Governments in Multilevel-Governance Political Dynamics: Towards a Research Agenda

In the last two decades research on various aspects of subnational governments’ policymaking on migration and diversity issues has been expanding and consolidating, leading to a ‘local turn’ in the migration policy literature (Zapata, Caponio and Scholten 2017). Case studies and comparative research in Europe and – more recently – beyond have shed new light on how policies are not only implemented but also actively produced and shaped in local migration policy arenas in which actors with different interests and conceptions of migration-related challenges continuously interact. In this paper I argue that a second generation research agenda on subnational immigration policy and politics needs to incorporate a truly multilevel-governance (MLG) approach to policymaking processes. The MLG perspective as theorised in public administration literature (see e.g. Agranoff 2018) can be of an extreme relevance in order to conceptualise and investigate the still under-researched topic of subnational governments’ global mobilisation on migration. In the paper I outline a possible research agenda on the topic and advocate for a comparative approach to the study of how cities/regions and network organisations engage in the transnational migration policy arena.