Governing Integration Policies in a Multi-Level Setting: Austria and Czechia Compared

Abstract

In migration studies, scholars differ in their emphasis on which level of government plays the central role in immigrant integration policies. There are voices drawing attention to a ‘local turn’, highlighting the rising power of local actors in immigrant integration. At the same time, other authors point to a ‘national turn’, connected to the introduction of civic integration policies – or even the Europeanisation of integration policies coming from the supranational level. In order to better understand how integration policies are governed, this article compares the Austrian and Czech governance of these policies, examining the relationship between the different levels of government involved. The analysis is based on Scholten’s typology of centralist, localist, decoupling and multi-level forms of governance. It asks how integration policies are governed in Austria and Czechia and how their governance changed with the implementation of civic integration policies. While centralist and decoupling tendencies appeared in the Austrian case, a multi-level governance approach emerged with civic integration in Czechia. These results disprove the assumption of a supposedly more likely multi-level governance approach in a federal state and a more centralised logic under the unitary regime, as suggested by the literature.

Keywords

• migration
• integration policy
• civic integration
• multi-level governance
• austria
• czech republic