New Kids on the Block or sly old fox? Italian regions and their engagement in asylum governance

Multilevel governance has become an established mode of governing immigrant integration, entailing a contribution of different actors across governmental levels. Yet, the governance of asylum-seekers’ dispersal and reception is still mainly divided between the state and the cities. In this paper we focus on the so-far neglected meso-level in asylum governance, and we argue, that also in asylum governance there is a regionalized dimension. We focus on three Italian regions during the 2015 ‘asylum crisis’ as exemplary cases asking: 1) How are regional policy networks organized? Is there any relevant regional variation, considering that regions do not have relevant competences in this policy field? 2) What is the role of regional governments in asylum policymaking, in relation to the local and the national levels? Based on a social network analysis using data collected through 100 structured surveys filled in by a wide range of asylum governance actors and on semi-structured interviews with the same interviewees we show that the organization of policy-making relations is highly regionalized. We find great variation in terms of: networks’ organization, networks’ cohesiveness, conflicts within the network. Second, regional governments adopt very different passive or proactive/interventionist strategies vis-as-vis both the local and the national level. We relate our findings to established hypotheses explaining regional policymaking activities, such as path dependency and ideational legacies (Zuber 2021), party politics and ideological opposition to the state (Adam and Hepburn 2019).