Governing integration policies in a multi-level setting: the case of Austria and Czechia

In migration studies, scholars differ in their emphasis on which level of government plays the central role in integration policies. There are voices drawing attention to a “local turn”, highlighting the rising power of local actors in immigrant integration. At the same time, other authors point out a “national turn” connected to the introduction of civic integration policies. Yet another point of view is supplemented with studies on the Europeanisation of migration and integration policies. In order to find out how then integration policies are governed, this article compares Austrian and Czech governance of integration policies, examining the relationship of different levels of government involved in immigrant integration. The paper founds its analysis in Scholten’s typology of centralist, localist, decoupling, and multi-level governance. It questions how different levels of government cooperate in immigrant integration governance in Austria and Czechia and how the form of immigrant integration governance changed with the implementation of civic integration measures. The research discovers that although centralist governance is observable in both cases, localist and decoupling trends appeared in the Austrian case, while a multi-level governance approach emerged with civic integration in Czechia. These results disprove the assumption of a supposedly more likely multi-level approach to govern integration policies in a federal state and a more centralised logic of governance under the unitary regime.