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

Summary/Abstract: In migration studies, scholars differ in their emphasis on which level of government plays the central rolein immigrant integration policies. There are voices drawing attention to a ‘local turn’, highlighting therising power of local actors in immigrant integration. At the same time, other authors point to a ‘nationalturn’, connected to the introduction of civic integration policies – or even the Europeanisation ofintegration policies coming from the supranational level. In order to better understand how integrationpolicies 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 onScholten’s typology of centralist, localist, decoupling and multi-level forms of governance. It asks howintegration policies are governed in Austria and Czechia and how their governance changed with theimplementation of civic integration policies. While centralist and decoupling tendencies appeared in theAustrian case, a multi-level governance approach emerged with civic integration in Czechia. These resultsdisprove the assumption of a supposedly more likely multi-level governance approach in a federal stateand a more centralised logic under the unitary regime, as suggested by the literature.

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