Transnational City Networks on Migration and Integration and Local Collaborative Governance: Establishing the Nexus

Abstract

Transnational city networks (TCNs) focused on international migration and migrant integration are an outcome of cities’ ever-larger role in migration governance beyond city boundaries. Although the nascent TCN literature has focused on networks’ emergence and expansion, TCNs’ effects on local actors within member cities remain underexplored. The article seeks to understand and explain the extent to which migration and integration TCNs contribute to collaboration between local governments and nonstate actors in member cities. To do so, I use collaborative governance to examine collaborative activities between local governments and nonstate actors in the context of two cities’ membership in TCNs: Barcelona and Rotterdam. My findings show that full collaboration, as the goal of collaborative governance, between local governments and nonstate actors within the framework of TCNs’ membership has not been achieved in the cities studied. Instead, I argue that collaboration with nonstate actors is selectively used by local governments to legitimize their position on TCNs and in the overall response to migration and integration. By establishing a nexus between TCNs and collaborative governance, the article offers a nuanced understanding of what collaboration between local governments and nonstate actors implies for (local) migration governance to migration scholarship. When collaboration does not reach its full potential, as findings show, then transnational debates on governing migration and integration from the city level become a distant reality for local nonstate actors, and by extension, local residents including migrants.