Barcelona: municipalist policy entrepreneurship in a centralist refugee reception system

This article is a case study of Barcelona’s policy entrepreneurship in innovating refugee reception. In a context of a highly centralised and increasingly dysfunctional Spanish refugee reception system, it traces how Barcelona, after declaring itself a city of refuge, aimed to change refugee reception into a more decentralised and bottom-up system with a major role of cities. Following Minstrom and Norman, the article reconstructs the city’s policy entrepreneurship and shows how the city 1) led by example in developing innovative local policies; 2) developed political arguments for change from a municipalist stance in coalition with other cities at national and EU level; and 3) worked its arguments into more technical discussions on the future of integration funding in the EU. On the basis of these developments, the article reaches two main conclusions. First, while the different registers of policy entrepreneurship cannot be directly connected to any concrete change of the multi-level setup of refugee reception, they do represent a significant step forward in cities’ self-organisation beyond ideological lines and a factor contributing to a stronger recognition of cities in refugee reception in Europe. Second, while the literature on multilevel governance has an in-built bias towards more coordinated and harmonious relationships across tiers, the case of Barcelona shows that more attention should be paid to conflict and change.Some of the interviews used in this paper (those conducted by Blanca Garcés) were conducted with the financial support of the H2020 project CEASEVAL. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 770037 and acronym CEASEVAL. This publication reflects only the author’s view and therefore the European Union and its Research and Executive Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains