Comparative report on the multilevel governance of the national asylum seekers’ reception systems

CEASEVAL Working papers No. 24

The report provides a comparative overview of asylum seekers’ reception systemsin seven EU countries (Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain). After presenting the theoretical framework, based on a critical approach to the theory of multilevel governance (MLG), the report describes the initial design of the national governance of asylum seekers’ reception in the target countries and it then focuses on their transformations over the last decade, paying specific attention to decision-making process. The report then moves on to explore the actual functioning of national reception systems, comparing centralised and federal/regional states. Finally, policy outcomes are discussed highlighting convergence and divergence trends. This report aims at unravelling the conditions and factors that are likely to drive the emerging of MLG policy arrangements on such a highly politicized issue as is asylum seekers reception. The report highlights the heterogeneity of evolutions of reception systems in the target countries, mainly due to the pressure of problems created by arrivals between 2011 and 2017, and the overall lack of convergence at national level, despite EUlevel rationalisation and harmonisation efforts. Politics seems also to have played some role in reception policy change across the target countries. In general in the context of the “refugee crisis” policymaking on asylum seekers reception became more centralised, leading in most countries to growing tensions between central governments and local authorities. Finally, it also evidences how, in crisis situations and independently from institutional structures, MLG arrangements develop from below – from the agency of local level authorities and non-public actors – to better address particularly complicate issues which require the coordination between many stakeholders.

 Keywords: asylum seekers, reception, multi-level governance, decision-making, CEAS, EU Reception Directives, policy agency