Innovative voluntary and public sector partnership for the reception and integration of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in Gothenburg, Sweden

Abstract

This chapter describes and analyses an innovative form of partnership for the reception and integration of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in Gothenburg, Sweden. The municipality of Gothenburg works with children who arrive in Sweden without adults. It does this through a form of collaborative partnership (idéburnaoffentligapartnerskap, IOP) with nine civil society organisations. Often housing and care are the only services asylum-seeking children receive through municipal or contracted service providers. The Gothenburg IOP provides children with a wide variety of complementary services including psychosocial counselling, access to Swedish social networks through volunteer ‘friend’ families, tailored leisure time activities and summer work practice opportunities. This IOP partnership is experimental in Swedish local public policy. It has been successful in increasing municipal capacities through new patterns of more equal and long-term relations with civil society.