In this paper, we examine the changing landscape of migration policy work conducted by civil society organisations (CSOs) in the Czech Republic. We focus on how funding opportunities affect CSOs’ policy work, long-term planning and everyday practices. Through a qualitative analysis of 15 interviews with representatives of non-governmental organisations and 11 interviews with policy stakeholders, we explored the critical and reflexive strategies adopted by CSOs. A crucial role in developing critical capacity seems to stem from umbrella organisations—organisations whose members are organisations. With respect to CSOs’ strong dependency on the state, umbrella organisations might serve as shields protecting individual organisations from direct conflicts with governmental policies and institutions. In the end, we assume that meta-organisations potentially function as important vehicles for the reflexive development and evolution of organisations and decrease transaction costs for the organisation field.
The Czech Republic has become the target of immigration over only the last three decades; currently, migrants compose 4.5% of the population. Governments in the previous decade have supported the vision of short-term labour migration, and foreigners face many administrative obstacles given the difficult legislation. We employ the concept of regulatory ritualism to grasp the distinctive features of the Czech system. Following Power (The audit society. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997) and Braithwaite (Regulatory capitalism: how it works, ideas for making it work better. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham/Northampton, 2008), we see regulation as a ritualised practice that comforts the public and cements the dominant normative order of migration policy. In this chapter, we introduce the historical and political context of migration policy, its institutional design, the Act on Residence of Foreign Nationals in the Czech Republic, the position of foreigners in Czech labour law, Czech integration policy and the consequences of recent institutional design for migrants. The main barriers of integration are difficult administration, poor knowledge of the language and precarious working conditions. Regulatory ritualism, a result of chaotic and unsystematic legislative work, is characterized by losing focus on achieving the goals or outcomes themselves, it establishes a climate of mutual distrust among those actors involved and places obstacles to collaboration between public authorities and migrants themselves.
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