Beyond discretion – the implementation of immigration detention policy from the perspective of collective decision-making

This article contributes to the literature on street-level bureaucracy by widening its scope to processes of collective decision-making introducing a conflictual, organisational approach. In recent year the street-level approach has been growing in migration studies. From this perspective scholars have been able to shed light on the daily practices of migration and border control agencies. Most importantly, however, they have shown how the daily routines and discretionary power of public officials form the cornerstone of the implementation process of migration policies (Infantino & Sredanovic 2022; Jordan, Stråth & Tryandafillidou 2003). These accounts of discretionary power depart from the old donut metaphor to illustrate how discretion is socially and historically constructed. As such, scholars developing Lipsky’s (1980) work have integrated into their analysis a wide array of factors that shape or influence the use of discretion. Regardless of their differences, the common scope and aim of these accounts is to show how at the end of the implementation chain, individual public agents use their discretion to grant, deny or withdraw rights and services to policy recipients and as such make policy. However, cases in which important decisions are taken collectively have remained outside of the scope of these studies. Yet, in such cases, the asymmetric power relations between public agency and policy recipient (Crosby & Rea 2022) are strengthened. As such, collective decision-making remains an important blind spot in the implementation literature. If organisations too have discretionary power (Brodkin 1990), how this organisational discretion is constructed remains to be unpacked. In this article I argue that we must look at the divisions and struggles inside the organisation to see how the collective decision is taken (Bourdieu 2000/2014). Based on ethnographic fieldwork in three different immigration detention centres in Belgium, I compare how detainees were treated differently in each facility. I focus on how decisions regarding the regime to which they were subjected were taken during multidisciplinary meetings. These decisions could range from taking no action to putting a detainee in solitary confinement. As such, these decisions could seriously impact the already uneasy experience of detention. Having the potential to impact the life of detainees greatly, these multidisciplinary meetings are pertinent sites of policy implementation. Furthermore, these decisions were taken collectively, as the meetings were composed members of management, social assistants, educators, nurses, psychologists and sometimes even members of security staff, who all gave input on specific detainees and participated in the discussions and analyses that led to specific decisions. Nonetheless, these different actors did not always agree on the final decision and thus developed strategies to influence the final decision. As such, these meetings are also interesting to analyse how collective decision-making was an actual battleground where different categories and members of staff competed or collaborated with each other to influence the decision-making process.