Understanding social innovation in refugee integration: actors, practices, politics in Europe

The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ marked a crucial juncture in migration governance across Europe. Policy-makers and local communities face the challenge of receiving and integrating migrants (often in extremely vulnerable conditions) in a context of poor governance arrangements and rising skepticism, or even hostility. In the light of such a complex scenario, this special issue explores social innovation as a promising approach to refugee integration. Socially innovative practices are indeed based on the active engagement of policy-makers and assorted stakeholders—including target groups through co-creation. In the realm of asylum policies, social innovation can thus facilitate the meeting of refugees’ needs as well as the benevolence of receiving communities, ultimately strengthening social cohesion in regions of settlement. Families hosting migrants at home, community-based cooperatives, and self-managed social spaces are all instances of socially innovative practices that are often initiated by non-state actors but that might be upscaled and transformed into fully fledged public policies—especially by policy-makers at the local and regional levels. The special issue will focus on labor, housing, and social integration of refugees (especially in the stages after their first reception) in the context of Central European cities and regions. The purpose is to develop conceptual tools for evaluating and designing socially innovative practices that might ultimately improve the social innovation capacity of local and regional governments. As the ‘social innovation’ concept risks to be ambiguous, the special issue will also allow researchers to develop a set of empirically grounded indicators for measuring social innovation capacity—especially based on the analysis of best practices that can be upscaled and replicated through mutual learning.