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ABSTRACT
The study of intergovernmental relations (IGR) is a classical research area in scholarship on federalism and territorial politics. However, it has largely ignored the relatively new, and recently decentralized area of immigrant integration. The aim of this Special Issue is twofold. First, it aims to analyse how governments in multi-level states coordinate on immigrant integration. Second, it wishes to explain the dynamics that shape the features of intergovernmental relations. In doing so, we focus on four multi-level states; two of which are federal (Belgium and Canada) and two that are decentralized (Italy and Spain). Whilst we engage with the established literature on intergovernmental relations to formulate hypotheses about the nature and dynamics of intergovernmental relations, we also formulate less explored hypotheses. Our overarching argument is that the scholarship on IGR benefits from in-depth comparative case studies comparing IGR not just across countries, but also across policy areas and over time.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the former and new editors and the anonymous reviewers to this journal for their constructive feedback. A special word of thanks also to the editorial assistants for their helpful technical support with the coordination of the Special Issue. The paper also greatly benefited from the comments of Kris Deschouwer, the contributors in this volume and the participants to the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop ‘The Spatial Reconfiguration of Public Policy in Multi-Level Systems’ (Nottingham, April 2017). Thanks to all!
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The idea for this Special Issue generated as a result of fruitful and inspiring collaboration between the editors of this volume, in the framework of a Belgian research project on the multi-level governance of immigrant integration (Adam and van Dijk Citation2015). This project mainly focused on Belgium, but included a modest comparative chapter focusing on other federal and decentralized states. Our Special Issue project started from the observation that immigrant integration policy scholars had not yet inquired into the study of intergovernmental relations, and that intergovernmental relations scholars did not yet put their spotlights on immigrant integration. Several of the contributors to this volume first met at the IMISCOE conference in Geneva in June 2015 discussing short concept notes. Full papers were authored and internally reviewed in 2016, and the full Special Issue was submitted to Regional and Federal Studies in the summer of 2017.
2 Based on Peters and Pierre’s argument that recent developments in IGR relations in the advanced Western democracies show a relative uniformity (Peters and Pierre Citation2001, 131), we limit our identification of factors and mechanisms shaping the nature of IGR to those identified for these countries.
3 Some of the publications do however describe instances of coordination on immigrant integration (see a.o. Joppke and Seidle Citation2012; Hepburn and Zapata-Barrero Citation2014; Baglay and Nakache Citation2014), but they do not do so systematically, on the basis of joint indicators, neither do they theorize when and how certain features of cooperation appear or not.
4 This Special Issue will only focus on coordination between governments, which is traditionally considered as IGR, and not within governments. As integration is a diffuse policy issue, we expect the coordination to be sufficiently high as to investigate its patterns (which would be difficult in a policy area where there is none). However, we will not compare the degree of interaction in this cross-sectoral and cross-level policy area with other policy areas, as these are not studied in this issue. Yet the study of IGR on immigrant integration prepares the field for future studies on IGR in other diffuse or sectoral policy areas.
5 Justice and Home Affairs Council, Press release 14615/04, 19 November 2004.
6 More elaborate definitions are presented in the next section.
7 We already defined what we mean with ‘institutionalized’ and ‘informal’ IGR, as well as ‘multilateral’ versus ‘bilateral’ IGR in the previous section.
8 For more information on mainstreaming immigrant integration into general policy areas, see Westerveen and Adam 2018.
9 For a discussion on the often debated constitutional structure of Spain, and our decision to categorise Spain as a regionalized state, see the paper of Núria Franco-Guillén on Spain in this Special Issue.
10 The intergovernmental platforms might be named differently than platforms on ‘immigrant integration’, for instance platforms on ‘refugee reception’ or ‘racial equality’.