Complementary or integrated or both? The role of non-governmental and civil society organisations in the governance of integration at the local level.

The arrival of large numbers of migrants in Austria seeking international protection after 2014 and their dispersal across the territory transformed existing and initiated new ‘arrival infrastructures’ (Meeus et al. 2019, 2020) and thus had a major impact on local governance regimes. In this paper, we focus on the role of non-governmental organisations and civil society initiatives in advocating for change and providing service, respectively (see Ataç & de Jong, 2017, Simsa, 2017). Focusing on four localities in Austria – a medium sized town, a small town and two rural municipalities and their surroundings – we can observe different types of organisations active in relation to migrant integration as well as different types of interaction with formal government levels as well as with each other. While both civil society organisations and service-oriented NGOs have been firmly integrated into local governance regimes in all four contexts, their shape, role and degree of autonomy differs remarkably between different contexts. In addition, we find that the geographical scope and location of organisations does not necessarily correspond to divisions of competences between different levels, highlighting the role of ‘networked’ forms of governance. Our paper contributes to two research gaps in the literature: namely the relative absence of research on civil society actors outside of large cities and the focus of must research on their involvement in “emergency management”. Empirically, we base our analysis on an extensive body of qualitative data collected between fall 2021 and early summer 2022 in the framework of the Whole-COMM project.