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ABSTRACT
The paper makes an innovative contribution to studies on the local governance of migration by considering the role played by Third Sector actors in three small municipalities in northern Italy: a mountain village, a rural village, and a town located at the edge of the great Milanese conurbation. The cases shed light on the implications that a small size can have for understanding the policy outputs and challenges of migration governance at the local level. Building on comparative qualitative data, the paper describes common features that can be observed in the local policy arena of small municipalities, such as the reduced number and limited heterogeneity of Third Sector actors, ease of access to local decision-makers, and blurred boundaries between politics and administration. It shows that such features can be associated with specific inclusionary and/or exclusionary policies that can be explained by local associational ecologies and local governments’ political orientation, despite the (often) limited human and economic resources available, but also by the activation of policy entrepreneurs and supra-local networks.
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Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Caritas is a well-known religious institution that has delivered charity since 1971. Its work at the local level is implemented in Italy through 220 local organisations (Caritas Diocesane), which are engaged in diverse social and charitable tasks such as drop-in centres, observatories on poverty, parochial services, shelters, etc.
2 According to Mintrom and Norman, policy entrepreneurs operate as ‘advocates of policy change’ contributing to develop convincing arguments on how to define a problem, building advocacy coalitions and developing pilot projects exemplifying how policy change can take place through their connection within policy networks and their understanding of the local policy context.
3 The leading partner was the SSIIM UNESCO Chair based at the University Iuav of Venice. Five other Italian universities were involved. For more details, see http://www.unescochair-iuav.it/en/research/ prin-small-size-cities/
4 Interviews were recorded but no quotations are reported here because of word limits. More recent data are not available: hence it must be considered that variations in local configurations also apply in consideration of the ongoing pandemic and the frequent changes in the migration policy domain.
5 The national health system in Italy is organised into socio-health districts, or territorial areas generally organised at the sub-provincial level responsible for the management and provision of socio-health care services.
6 The head of the local primary school reported that at the beginning of 2014 foreign children represented about one-third of school pupils.
7 Some of these practices, also adopted in other municipalities, have repeatedly been deemed discriminatory in the courts.
8 The request of a group of Ukrainian women for a locale in which to meet was ignored by the local administration and delegated to local Catholic organisations, while use of the local football field was denied to a group of asylum seekers hosted in Mortara.
9 SPRAR stands for System of Protection for Asylum Seekers and Refugees. Following normative changes, it has been renamed SAI (System of Reception and Integration).
10 Some children of migrant origin were left without lunch at school because their families were not able to complete the increasingly burdensome documentation required by the municipal social workers to access means-tested benefits.
11 Drop-in centres (Centri di Ascolto) are the main means by which the territorial organisations of Caritas in Italy (Caritas Diocesane) have been supporting poor people of both immigrant and Italian origin. The centres mostly provide help to satisfy primary needs and give orientation to local services. In 2017, there were 3,366 Centri di Ascolto in Italy. The data available from 59 per cent of them state that the persons assisted in that year amounted to 197,332 (42.2% with Italian citizenship, 57.8% foreign). Information collected on people assisted by Centri di Ascolto is an important database through which Caritas contributes to knowledge about poverty and strategies to combat poverty in Italy.
12 The Provincial Headquarters Office of the Ministry of Interior.
13 One (including 46 municipalities) was signed by the provincial authority of Brescia, the Association of the Municipalities of the Province of Brescia—the Comunità Montana di Valle Camonica—the main territorial entity of the Adamello National Park; another was signed by the Comunità Montana and the Brescia Prefecture (Provincial Headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior).