CALL FOR PAPERS, 19TH IMISCOE ANNUAL CONFERENCE, June 29 - July 1, 2022, Oslo, Norway
Street-level bureaucrats and immigrants access to welfare entitlements
Panel convenors: Jean-Michel Lafleur (ULiège) and Peter de Cuyper (KULeuven)
Starting from the pioneer work of Lipsky (1980), the literature on street-level bureaucracy widely developed across different thematic areas and disciplinary approaches. Overall, these works allow studying policy implementation from a bottom-up perspective, focusing on the ways in which public services function on the ground and on the role of bureaucrats – and their discretion – in this process. The integration of this analytical perspective into migration studies has led to interesting empirical research and theoretical implications on the interconnection between welfare and immigration policies in particular (see for example Cuadra & Staaf, 2014), and to a renewed interest on the access of immigrants to social rights. Moreover, conceptualisations of welfare deservingness (Chauvin & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2012) and conditional forms of citizenship (Burrell & Schweyher, 2019; Dwyer et at., 2019) have been elaborated to study the multiplicity of factors and representations intervening in the assessment of immigrants’ eligibility to social rights by street-level bureaucrats.
This panel aims at developing an overview of the functioning on the ground of welfare policies targeting immigrants in different contexts and in relation with the different social actors involved. The objective is twofold. On the one hand, we aim at bringing into the discussion a variety of perspectives, in particular accounting for the experience of immigrants themselves and their interaction with street-level bureaucrats, which is a view less developed in the literature (Raeymaeckers & Dierckx, 2013). Second, the aim of this panel is to question the existing conceptualisations on the ways in which street-level bureaucracy operates with regard to immigrants, and to bring new and challenging insights from recent research.
The panel will address the topic of street-level bureaucrats and immigrants access to welfare entitlements through a multidimensional approach and a variety of thematic and conceptual focuses, i.e. accessibility issues, decision-making processes, discrimination, activation policies, migration regimes implications, etc.
This panel is organised within the framework of the research project OCMW/CPAS & new migrants/refugees: opening the black box of policy in practice (BBOX) founded by Belspo (Belgium).
We invite scholars interested in including a paper in this proposal, to send an abstract (250-word maximum) to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 8 December 2021 at the latest. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 13 December 2021. For more information about the 2022 IMISCOE Annual Conference, please visit https://www.imiscoe.org/events/imiscoe-events/1380-19th-imiscoe-annual-conference.
This call can be downloaded here.