The article examines from a comparative perspective how Sweden and Germany reacted to the unprecedented increase in unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) in 2015. Concretely, it analyses on the basis of Windrum’s taxonomy of public-sector innovation what kinds of generic and context-specific policy instruments have been developed for this particularly vulnerable group and discusses whether and to what extent prevailing welfare-service organizational arrangements have changed in the two countries since 2015. By illustrating the reactions of two countries, the study shows that an unprecedented wave of refugees/asylum seekers can trigger both more incremental, adaptive and drastic transformative policy changes. The policy systems of both countries indicate not only some resilience, but also overburdened government capacity and more drastic changes that led to reduction of the legal rights of UASC.
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.
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