Learning and Change.A Comparative Study of Gothenburg Municipality’s Reception of Syrian and Ukrainian Asylum Seekers, 2015-2025.

Sammanfattning

This study examines the strategies and learning processes that the municipality of Gothenburg developed for its shelter policies in the face of refugee influxes respectively from Syria in 2015 and Ukraine in 2022. The focus of the study is to understand how their responses evolved and how their housing strategies were shaped in these two situations. To this end, semi-structured interviews were conducted with municipal staff, and policy documents were analyzed. Thematic analysis was chosen for the analysis of the findings. As a result, organizational adaptation and learning, top-down dynamics in multi-level refugee governance, challenges in implementation and responses in local government, feedback mechanisms, institutional burdens and responsibility sharing, and multi-stakeholder collaboration and collaborative solutions were reached. While the findings show that the municipality was more coordinated in 2022 than in 2015 and had developed certain regular structures with agreements with various stakeholders, they also highlighted the constant variability of practices due to certain constraints. Examples of these constraints include the variability of national policies, the variability in the legal status of refugees, the variability of refugee size and the lack of housing in Gothenburg. This study contributes to the migration management and organizational learning literature on refugee reception. Specifically on how large municipalities responded to this two focusing influxes.