The EU Urban Partnership on Inclusion: Institutionalizing Local–Supranational Integration Governance

Abstract

In times when immigrant integration is considered both a highly salient political topic and a practical challenge by local, national, and European decision-makers, an analysis of the governance approach developed by the European Union (EU) Urban Partnership on Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees opens up new opportunities to advance research on migration studies’ “local turn.” In this IMR Dispatch from the Field, we argue that exploring the joint local-EU agenda-setting and cooperation in the Urban Partnership on Inclusion can refine understandings of multilevel governance. We argue that what is intriguing about the Urban Partnership on Inclusion for migration scholars is the institutionalization of local–supranational cooperation within an existing intergovernmental EU structure as a way to advance multilevel governance, even when the national level remains passive. Demonstrating the ways in which the Urban Partnership on Inclusion differs from city networks focused on questions of migration and integration, we show that the Urban Partnership on Inclusion offers a common structure to EU institutions and local authorities to coordinate agendas and actions, both from the local level upward and from the EU level downward while aiming to find ways around national passivity. Paying closer attention to such forms of institutionalized local–supranational governance developing within state-led structures, we suggest, can advance migration research and shed light on emerging local–supranational governance arrangements both at the European and the international levels.