Community Connections: Understanding Local Dynamics in Italian Asylum Policy Implementation

Abstract

Italy hosts significant numbers of forced migrants throughout its territory. The implementation of asylum policy thus occurs in diverse and sometimes fraught contexts, presenting different resources and obstacles. This paper examines how local context shapes the experiences and practices of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) implementing policy in the Italian statutory asylum system. Semi-structured interviews with workers in two projects, one in a conservative rural area and one in a progressive urban area, show that the urban/rural divide alone is not an appropriate predictor of similarities and differences in policy implementation and outcomes, which are largely shaped by context-specific sociocultural and relational elements. Workers’ off-duty mediation in interpersonal contact between migrants and community members fosters positive encounters that could partially offset traditionally conservative political cultures and hostile attitudes; however, the same cultures and attitudes cause workers to feel isolated and alienated from their community. Furthermore, SLBs’ decision-making practices in both projects are always collegial and constrained by exhaustive rules, largely eliminating the need for individual discretion typical of SLBs and creating instead “group discretionary” bureaucrats. In light of these findings, I argue for increased attention to locality beyond the simple urban versus rural lens, and increased focus on asylum SLBs as a distinct category of “doubly embedded” SLBs participating in both policy implementation and local context.