Driving Migrant Inclusion through Social Innovation: Lessons for Cities in a Pandemic

"The outbreak of COVID-19 and the measures put in place to contain it...have disrupted much of the public infrastructure that supports migrant and refugee integration."

As European cities begin to re-open after COVID-19 lockdowns imposed in Spring 2020, governments are tasked with figuring out how they will support their migrant and refugee populations amid ongoing social distancing orders and other measures to contain the spread of the virus. This Migration Policy Institute (MPI) Europe-International Organization for Migration (IOM) study explores the social innovations developed in some European Union (EU) municipalities since 2015-16 in the area of migrant integration. It explores promising practices and persistent challenges, offering reflections on how these lessons can help diverse cities advance inclusion and social cohesion amid the economic, social, and political uncertainty associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report is mainly based on research conducted as part of the ADMin4ALL - Supporting Social Inclusion of Vulnerable Migrants in Europe project, which carried out interviews with representatives of municipalities and civil society organisations (CSOs) that have faced particularly challenging situations in Austria, Greece, Italy, Malta, Poland, Romania, and Spain.

As outlined in the report, the social innovations developed since the spike in migrant and refugee arrivals 2015-16 fall into 4 broad categories, which coincide with the organisation of the report:

1. Addressing the needs of the most vulnerable and hardest to reach - Examples of efforts to reach newly arrived immigrants who fall through the gaps of traditional service provision can be seen in Palermo, Italy, and Thessaloniki, Greece, where CSOs have created networks to provide holistic services to unaccompanied children. The Italian city of Milan developed a model that incorporates access to housing and counselling to reduce the exclusion of vulnerable, homeless, and marginalised groups. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic poses a threat to such services: Not only do they generally revolve around in-person interactions, but they may be difficult for financially strapped governments to sustain. Still, some civil society groups have taken up virtual tools to foster continued engagement; for example, the Swedish non-profit Kompis Sverige (Buddy Sweden), which since 2014 has cooperated with the municipality of Botkyrka to promote migrant integration through a buddy programme, moved its socialising, mentoring, and language learning activities to a web platform. And some of the ideas, such as matching refugees with volunteer and civic engagement opportunities to build skills, confidence, and social capital - as explored by projects in Warsaw, Poland; Thessaloniki, Greece; or Ghent, Belgium - may give migrants and refugees the opportunity to engage in productive activity while also allowing local governments to address growing social needs.
2. Engaging receiving communities to build social cohesion - The COVID-19 pandemic led to a surge of hyper-localised community engagement, particularly during the most acute phase of the lockdowns, when many people's daily reality was extremely circumscribed. Along these lines, one way for cities to promote informal ties of trust between newcomers and established residents is to tap into the localised identities and shared responsibilities that come from living in the same neighbourhood. Examples of this approach include the participatory neighbourhood assemblies in Malaga, Spain, that work to improve the living conditions of all local residents, and plans by the city of Gdansk, Poland, to build onto the existing structure of its Neighbourhood Houses to allow residents to develop their own activities related to cohesion and inclusion. Many cities also rely on volunteers to reinforce local services - as in the case of volunteer guardians for unaccompanied children in Palermo and Milan. However, volunteer-based approaches have invited criticism that they are a shortcut to budget cuts for official services.
3. Building untraditional, multi-stakeholder partnerships - Cities can benefit from working with a diverse set of partners, such as research institutes, international organisations, grassroots non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and social entrepreneurs. A central element has been a move away from cities seeing non-governmental partners primarily as implementors of policies or programmes and towards a more peer-to-peer relationship that involves them in shaping services as well. Local players may emerge as key actors as communities adapt to COVID-19-related challenges; however, city authorities accustomed to collaborating with larger and more established parts of civil society often struggle to form meaningful partnerships with more informal, community-based groups. Migrant associations in particular may find themselves sidelined or pigeonholed and only tapped for expertise on immigration and integration projects. Involving such organisations as providers of municipal social services - as examples from Milan, Italy, and Warsaw, Poland, show - can help them build confidence and an image as key strategic partners within the local social economy, rather than just cultural institutions.
4. Co-creating services - Involving beneficiaries of services in their design and delivery can help cities understand the hurdles migrant and refugees face on their integration journeys and design more streamlined services. Examples range from Palermo, Italy's "validation groups", a panel of potential service users who help a network of local service providers and city authorities design initiatives for unaccompanied children, to an effort in Antwerp, Belgium, to include the voices of refugees in the process of defining and evaluating the success of a co-housing programme. Applying co-creation methods locally to design solutions to COVID-19-related challenges could help cities promote community cohesion across group boundaries while also ensuring the needs of migrants and refugees are reflected in relief and stimulus measures. However, the application of the co-creation strategy has thus far been limited, and this approach can also inadvertently favour the involvement of better educated and more articulate members of a population.

In reflecting on ongoing challenges and lessons for the COVID-19 crisis, the author suggests that, "With the right leadership, local governments could leverage, organize, and sustain this civic engagement so that it helps them respond to rapidly changing social needs." Guiding this innovation to foster more inclusive communities will require, for example:

• Addressing the hard questions of social innovation - e.g., cities should make interdepartmental collaboration the norm, rather than an exceptional occurrence.
• Nurturing the new social infrastructure - e.g., cities will need to get creative in how they engage with residents, including through neighbourhood-based approaches and digital channels.
• Moving from "social innovation for migrant inclusion" to "inclusive social innovation" - e.g., city governments could help migrant associations strengthen their networks with public authorities and other CSOs while ensuring their involvement in key local consultation and decision-making forums to design a roadmap out of crisis.

In conclusion: "The pandemic could be the making of a community-led, holistic approach to inclusion, one built around a sense of shared challenges and responsibilities that cuts across community divides. But for this to become a reality, cities will need to think and act strategically in the short term, resisting the temptation to sacrifice the progress achieved in recent years to the altar of new (and hasty) solutions."

Editor's note: Click the video below to watch the webinar recording of a September 24 2020 virtual event in which IOM, MPI, the European Commission (EC), and local representatives discussed the role of social innovation in furthering migrants' integration at local levels and presented the study summarised above.