When the State Steps Back, the City Steps Up
Mapping the Channels of Urban Resistance to National Migration Governance Through the Case of Barcelona
7 July, 2026.
Philippine Farcy
CityDiplomacy.org
Introduction
«Even if this is an issue of state and European jurisdiction, from Barcelona we will do as much as we can to participate in a network of refugee-cities. We want cities built on human rights and life, cities we can be proud of (Global Voice, 2015).» With this speech, Mayor Ada Colau was making not only a humanitarian appeal but a governance claim, that cities were willing and able to act even if the states were not (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020).
Colau’s declaration came against the backdrop of the EU Relocation Scheme’s failure. Established by Council Decision 2015/1601 (European Commission, 2016). The scheme aimed to redistribute 160,000 asylum seekers from Italy and Greece across EU member states (European Parliament, 2019). Yet by March 2018, fewer than a quarter had been relocated, as states refused, delayed, or minimally complied (European Parliament, 2019). Spain’s slow implementation of the EU relocation scheme, with only about 10% of its allocated asylum seekers relocated by 2017, prompted Barcelona to act through its own channels (European Commission, 2017).
This essay asks what those channels were, and what they reveal about the autonomous agency available to cities within national and EU migration governance. Barcelona is chosen as the primary case for two main reasons: it is the most extensively documented European city in the academic literature on urban migration resistance (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020; Delclós, Ribera-Almandoz & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2026; Hansen, 2019) and its response was unusually comprehensive. This paper does not claim that Barcelona is representative. Rather, it argues that this case study reveals the potential of urban agency in shaping migration governance.
Drawing on multilevel governance theory, the decoupling framework, and Tarrow’s concept of venue shopping, this essay maps three distinct channels: political, administrative, and transnational (Hooghe & Marks, 2001; Scholten & Penninx, 2016 ; Tarrow, 2011). Together, they demonstrate that cities possess a broader repertoire of autonomous agency than EU migration governance formally recognises.
Context – The Relocation Scheme
The Relocation Scheme was an emergency EU mechanism created in September 2015, following the height of the refugee crisis (European Parliament, 2019). It was established by two Council Decisions, 2015/1523 and 2015/1601, and aimed to relocate 160,000 asylum seekers from Italy and Greece to other EU member states (European Commission, 2016; European Parliament, 2019). Member states were assigned a specific number of asylum seekers they were legally obligated to receive (Council of the European Union, 2015). The scheme was supposed to run for two years, from 2015 to 2017 (Council of the European Union, 2015).
Crucially, the scheme operated at the national level only. The European Commission negotiated with national governments. Cities, which were the places actually receiving and integrating people, had no formal role in the scheme’s architecture. Ultimately, the scheme largely failed. By March 2018, after the programme had expired, only 33,846 of the planned 160,000 asylum seekers had been relocated (European Parliament, 2019).
While national governments were reluctant to abide by their obligations, several cities were actively offering to receive relocated asylum seekers. Barcelona was one of them. The city had a long-standing history of supporting refugees and was able to draw upon a well-established pre-existing infrastructure (Delclós, Ribera-Almandoz & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2026). Furthermore, the election of a radical-left municipal government, Barcelona en Comú (BeC), in 2015, reinforced the city’s strong commitments to refugee reception governance (Triviño-Salazar, 2022). However, as mentioned above, since the relocation plan’s architecture was national, there was no formal mechanism through which cities could act. Consequently, they had to work with their own channels. It is precisely these channels through which Barcelona sought to parallel and contest state policies that this essay aims to map.
Analytical Framework
Cities in the EU are not simply extensions of their national governments. They hold independent sources of democratic legitimacy and administrative capacity which creates space for local policy making. Understanding how they leverage this potential requires examining the structural conditions that make autonomous city action possible, the form that divergence takes, the channels of action cities select.
Why Cities Can Act – Multi-Level Governance (MLG)
According to Hooghe and Marks (2001), authority is not merely devolved from Brussels to cities, it is dispersed across supranational, national, regional, and local levels simultaneously, with each level holding its own legitimate claim to govern. Hooghe and Marks (2001) distinguish between two types of multilevel governance. Type I resembles Russian dolls. Authority is nested across a fixed number of territorial levels, each jurisdiction sitting inside the previous one. Type II works like lego bricks. Different jurisdictions overlap and are designed around specific policy tasks rather than geographic units. These two types are not mutually exclusive; cities are Type I actors by nature, embedded in national territorial hierarchies, but they can simultaneously operate as Type II actors, forming transnational networks, for instance. These two types of MLG illuminate the conditions under which cities can challenge state policy through either vertical or horizontal forms of engagement.
How Cities Diverge: Decoupling
Scholten and Penninx (2016) identify three modes of city-national government relations on migration: incorporation, where cities successfully push their preferences upward into national policy; conflict, where disagreement becomes open and direct; and decoupling, where cities develop autonomous local policies without necessarily direct confrontation . While Scholten and Penninx’s (2016) framework describes the relationship between city and state, it does not explain the institutional mechanisms through which these policy development actually happens. This is the gap this essay addresses. Mapping those strategies is necessary to understand how cities can act.
Applying the logic of Scholten and Penninx’s model of city-national relation to the mechanisms employed by cities to advance their own policy preferences, this essay examines three arenas through which Barcelona has routed its political agency on migration: political (normative public discourse), administrative (municipal service provision), and transnational (city networks).
Analysis
Political Channel – Contesting Competence Through Discourse
The political channel is the most structurally constrained of the three. Unlike the administrative channel, it does not produce independent service delivery. Unlike the transnational channel, it does not bypass the state. Instead, it operates within the state relationship directly, using public discourse, formal demands, and the strategic construction of a governance narrative to contest the boundaries of municipal competence and expand the political space within which cities can act (Triviño-Salazar, 2019).
The structural context made this channel necessary. Asylum is a state competence in Spain (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020). The state’s exclusive competence over asylum explains why municipalities were limited to providing legal advice to asylum seekers and referring them to state reception programmes (Ajuntament de Barcelona, n.d.-a; Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020). Concretely, Barcelona had no formal authority over refugee reception. Hence, the political channel was its primary tool for claiming that authority.
Barcelona deployed three distinct discursive strategies. First, it made democratic legitimacy claims. To ground their claims, Barcelona, in concert with other cities, stressed that they were democratically elected governments, hence representing 6.5 million people that the state was deliberately ignoring (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020). Second, it made legal and human rights claims. Cities highlighted the State’s human rights obligation to provide asylum and support to refugees (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020). Third, it made efficiency claims, arguing that the absence of coordination between state and city was forcing municipalities to spend their own resources on reception outside the state system, and that minimal institutional loyalty between levels of government could avoid this waste (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020).
The state’s response sharpened the confrontation. The prime minister reiterated that asylum policy fell under exclusive state competence and criticised cities for overstepping their jurisdiction through local initiatives (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020). This refusal to coordinate also had a financial dimension: Barcelona denounced the non-allocation to cities of the 521.7 million euros received by the Spanish state from the EU to implement the Relocation Scheme (Delclós, Ribera-Almandoz & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2026). The state was receiving EU funding designated for refugee reception while refusing to share either the resources or the governance responsibility with the cities actually managing arrivals.
These public exchanges produced no immediate policy change. But as Garcés-Mascareñas and Gebhardt (2020) argue, they performed a function beyond persuasion: they acted as a form of public monitoring of the state’s implementation of the Relocation Scheme, documenting non-compliance and making it politically visible. Municipal actors and civil society mobilised symbolic and material resources to contest exclusionary national and supranational frameworks, with attention to confrontations over policy competence (Delclós, Ribera-Almandoz & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2026). By repeatedly asserting its own readiness to act while documenting the state’s failure to do so, Barcelona did not formally redistribute legal authority, but it progressively repositioned cities as legitimate and capable migration governance actors in the public and political imagination. That repositioning created the political conditions under which the administrative and transnational channels could operate with greater legitimacy.
The Administrative Channel – Decoupling
The administrative channel is where decoupling as theorised by Scholten and Penninx (2016) becomes most concrete. Rather than challenging the state through discourse or lobbying EU institutions, Barcelona built a parallel reception system using its own municipal resources, independently of state coordination and beyond its formally assigned competencies. This was not a supplementary provision. It was autonomous governance.
The structural starting point matters. As mentioned above, before 2015, municipalities restricted their role in asylum policy to offering legal guidance to potential asylum seekers and directing them towards state reception schemes (Ajuntament de Barcelona, n.d.-a; Delclós, Ribera-Almandoz & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2026). This role limitation did not pose a local problem, since prior to the crisis, the numbers of asylum seekers remained quite low. (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020). The 2015 Refugee crisis and Relocation Scheme’s failure changed this entirely. As Spain received fewer than 1,000 asylum seekers, compared with its allocation of over 9,000, Barcelona chose to act independently (European Commission, 2016; Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020)
Barcelona’s administrative response had three concrete dimensions. First, it expanded SAIER, the Care Service for Immigrants, Emigrants and Refugees, in operation since 1989, far beyond its original mandate. SAIER adapted its structure to expand its care from 811 people in 2014 to 8,387 in 2020 (CIDOB, 2022).This tenfold increase was not driven by state instruction, it was driven by municipal political will and funded by municipal resources.
Second, Barcelona launched the Nausica Programme specifically to address the population the state system was failing to accommodate (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020). The programme attended to refugees excluded from state coverage through an individualised work plan. Concretely, it provided refugees with professional, social and psychological support, language teaching, legal, formative and labour guidance, and schooling for children, as well as temporary housing (Global Forum on Migration and Development, 2019). Nausica was not a complement to the state system, it was a correction of its failures, designed precisely for those the state had excluded.
Third, and most revealingly, Barcelona financed this entire parallel system from its own municipal budget. The city invested over 6 million euros of its own resources during the first three years of the Barcelona City of Refuge Plan, while the state retained EU funds designated for exactly this purpose (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020). What clashed in this exchange were different ideas of legal duties and competences (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020).
This financial dimension is the administrative channel’s clearest analytical signature. Barcelona did not merely expand services, it substituted its own fiscal resources for state resources that were being withheld. Accordingly, Barcelona effectively absorbed a governance function the state had formally claimed but practically abandoned. This trend reflects the emergence of local asylum policies that took tangible form (CIDOB, 2022). In doing so, Barcelona demonstrated that administrative decoupling is not only possible within a highly centralized state system, it is the predictable response when cities have both the political will and the municipal infrastructure to act.
The Transnational Channel -Bypassing the State
The transnational channel operates on a different logic from the political and administrative channels. Rather than pressuring the state from below or building parallel services independently, it routes political agency horizontally, across cities, and vertically upward directly to EU institutions, bypassing the national level entirely. This is Hooghe and Marks’s Type II MLG in practice: flexible, task-specific arrangements that cut across territorial hierarchies rather than working through them (Hooghe & Marks, 2001).
Barcelona’s transnational engagement developed in three escalating phases. The first was direct city-to-city cooperation. In response to the state’s lack of engagement with municipal coordination requests, cities began to build their own international networks with other cities and NGOs (Bazurli & Kaufmann, 2023). In March 2016, the city government of Barcelona and Athens discussed the possibility of resettling 100 migrants in Barcelona at the expense of the municipality, but was denied by Spain’s Prime Minister (Bazurli & Kaufmann, 2023). Rajoy’s refusal to authorise the transfer was analytically significant: it confirmed that even when two cities had the political will and the financial capacity to act, the state could block city-to-city cooperation by invoking once again its exclusive competence over asylum procedures (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020).
The second phase was collective network mobilisation. Following the failed Athens relocation attempt, Barcelona co-founded the Solidarity Cities initiative within the EUROCITIES framework (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020). The Solidarity Cities initiative was launched at a press conference in Athens on 17 October 2016, following city-to-city discussion (Eurocities, 2019; Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020). The cities sought to secure a stronger role in the formulation of migration policy at European and national levels (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020).
The third phase was direct EU-level institutional lobbying. Through the EU Urban Agenda Partnership on Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees, led by EUROCITIES with Barcelona as a named member, cities produced a formal recommendation paper in March 2018 calling for improved access to EU integration funding and direct AMIF channels to local authorities (Inclusion Partnership, 2018). These networks attempted to secure direct funding from the EU, and contributed to a greater recognition of cities as capable actors (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020).
The effectiveness of this channel was mixed. The Athens-Barcelona relocation attempt failed and the Relocation Scheme expired in 2017 without cities gaining formal recognition in its architecture. Yet the longer-term trajectory suggests the transnational channel produced structural effects that the political and administrative channels could not. City networks have been notably successful in advancing their policy preferences onto the political agenda (Bazurli & Kaufmann, 2023). Indeed, the EU Action Plan on Integration and Inclusion recognised cities’ key role in integrating migrants. Furthermore, within the Asylum Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) framework, local authorities became eligible to receive direct funding (European Committee of the Regions, 2024; Inclusion Partnership, 2018). Overall, the transnational channel operates on a longer time horizon than the other two, it does not produce immediate results but reshapes the institutional architecture within which future city action takes place.
Policy Discussion and Conclusion
Barcelona’s response to the EU Relocation Scheme’s failure reveals something that EU migration governance has consistently struggled to acknowledge: cities are not passive implementation sites. They are governance actors with their own democratic legitimacy, administrative capacity, and political agency. Consequently, when formal governance architecture excludes them, they act through whatever channels their institutional resources make available.
The three channels this essay has mapped are analytically distinct. The political channel operated discursively. Barcelona used public pressure, rights-based arguments, and the strategic documentation of state failure to contest the boundaries of municipal competence and expand the political space within which cities could act (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020; Triviño-Salazar, 2019). The administrative channel operated materially. The city built a parallel reception system, expanding SAIER infrastructure and launching the Nausica Programme from its own budget. The city absorbed a governance function the state had formally claimed but practically abandoned (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020; CIDOB, 2022). The transnational channel operated institutionally: Barcelona co-founded Solidarity Cities, engaged in the EU Urban Agenda Partnership, and contributed to reshaping the AMIF funding architecture (Bazurli & Kaufmann, 2023; Inclusion Partnership, 2018). Together, these three channels constitute a repertoire of urban agency that cities need to leverage.
The honest assessment of their effectiveness is mixed. The political channel produced no immediate state compliance. Spain hosted relatively few refugees compared to its European counterparts,despite being among the top four refugee destinations in Europe (Barcelona Refuge City, n.d.b). The administrative channel was effective but fiscally unsustainable. Indeed, Barcelona invested over six million euros of its own resources while the Spanish state retained EU funds designated for exactly this purpose (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020). While the transnational channel produced little concrete results in the short term, international networking was significantly influential in terms of agenda-setting, contributing to the EU Action Plan on Integration and Inclusion 2021–2027’s formal recognition of cities as key stakeholders (Bazurli & Kaufmann, 2023; Integrating Cities, 2022). The channels work, but they work slowly, unevenly, and at significant cost to the cities that deploy them.
This finding has direct implications for how the EU’s 2024 Pact on Migration and Asylum should be implemented. The Pact, adopted in April 2024, remains architecturally state-centred. Its solidarity mechanisms operate between member states, and cities appear primarily as implementation sites rather than governance actors (European Commission, 2024). The European Committee of the Regions has already identified this gap, calling for improved direct access to EU funds such as AMIF for local and regional authorities (European Committee of the Regions, 2024). Yet as this essay’s analysis of the 2015 Relocation Scheme demonstrates, the structural problem is not only funding access, it is governance architecture. Despite the boost in existing resources, national programmes remain administered at the government level. Cities remain formally invisible in the mechanisms that govern the very crisis they are managing on the ground.
Three concrete policy changes follow from this analysis. First, direct AMIF access for cities should be formalised. The EU should remove the national government intermediary that currently allows states to retain EU integration funding while cities absorb integration costs independently. Second, city networks such as EUROCITIES and Solidarity Cities should be granted formal consultative status in the Pact’s implementation architecture. This status would convert the transnational channel from an informal lobbying tool into a recognised governance mechanism. Third, enforcing mechanisms requiring national governments to coordinate with cities on asylum reception planning should be strengthened. This lack of coordination, that Barcelona documented repeatedly between 2015 and 2017, was the primary driver of administrative duplication and political conflict (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020; Delclós, Ribera-Almandoz & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2026).
Formally recognising cities as migration governance actors is not a radical proposal. As Barcelona’s decade of policy entrepreneurship demonstrates, it is a description of what cities are already doing. The question for EU policymakers is not whether cities should play a role in migration governance. It is whether that role should continue to be invisible.
References
Ajuntament de Barcelona. (n.d.-a). Reception, accommodation and care. Barcelona Refuge City. Retrieved June 9, 2026, from https://www.ciutatrefugi.barcelona/en/reception-accommodation-and-care
Ajuntament de Barcelona. (n.d.-b). Spain and the humanitarian crisis. Barcelona Refuge City. Retrieved June 9, 2026, from https://www.ciutatrefugi.barcelona/en/spain-response
Bazurli, R., & Kaufmann, D. (2023). Insurgent asylum policies in European cities: A multi-level governance perspective. Urban Affairs Review, 59(4), 1011–1043. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10780874221091594
CIDOB. (2022). The urban dimension of the international protection crisis: The case of Barcelona. CIDOB Report, 10. https://www.cidob.org/en/articulos/cidob_report/n_10/the_urban_dimension_of_the_international_protection_crisis_the_case_of_barcelona
Delclós, C., Ribera-Almandoz, O., & Garcés-Mascareñas, B. (2026). Contesting sanctuary: Urban citizenship and multilevel migration governance in Barcelona. Urban Studies, 63(5), 1090–1110. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251387828
Global Voices. (2015, September 5). An ‘appeal to affection and empathy’: Barcelona’s mayor wants Spain’s cities to welcome refugees. Global Voices. https://globalvoices.org/2015/09/05/an-appeal-to-affection-and-empathy-barcelonas-mayor-wants-spains-cities-to-welcome-refugees/
Eurocities. (2019). Welcoming cities. https://eurocities.eu/stories/welcoming-cities/
European Commission. (2016, March 16). First report on relocation and resettlement (COM(2016) 165 final). European Commission. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM:2016:165:FIN
European Commission. (2017). Ninth report on relocation and resettlement (COM(2017) 74 final). European Commission. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/resource.html?uri=cellar:71f7784f-ff32-11e6-8a35-01aa75ed71a1.0001.02/DOC_1&format=PDF
European Commission. (2024, April 30). EU Pact on Migration and Asylum: Reinforced rules to tackle migration challenges. European Commission. https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/eu-pact-migration-and-asylum-reinforced-rules-tackle-migration-challenges-2024-04-30_en
European Committee of the Regions. (2024, October 8). Common implementation plan for the Pact on Migration and Asylum: The local and regional perspective (Opinion CDR 2717/2024). European Committee of the Regions. https://cor.europa.eu/en/our-work/opinions/cdr-2717-2024
European Parliament. (2019, November 20). 1st emergency relocation scheme: Legislative train schedule. European Parliament. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/package-immediate-action/file-1st-emergency-relocation-scheme
Garcés-Mascareñas, B., & Gebhardt, D. (2020). Barcelona: Municipalist policy entrepreneurship in a centralist refugee reception system. Comparative Migration Studies, 8(1), Article 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-020-0173-z
Global Forum on Migration and Development. (2019). Barcelona, refuge city. https://www.gfmd.org/pfp/ppd/11552
Hansen, B. R. (2019). City of refuge and migration. In Solidarity cities in Europe (pp. 55–). Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/sonst_publikationen/Broschur_SolidarischeStaedte_engl_web.pdf#page=55
Hooghe, L., & Marks, G. (2001). Multi-level governance and European integration. Rowman & Littlefield.
Inclusion Partnership. (2018). Access to EU integration funding. EU Urban Agenda Partnership on Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees. https://www.inclusionpartnership.com/access-to-eu-integration-funding
Scholten, P., & Penninx, R. (2016). The multilevel governance of migration and integration. In B. Garcés-Mascareñas & R. Penninx (Eds.), Integration processes and policies in Europe: Contexts, levels and actors (pp. 91–108). Springer. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-21674-4_6
Triviño-Salazar, J. C. (2019). Multi-level governance as an alternative: The municipality of Barcelona and the Ciutat Refugi Plan. Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation. https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/glocalism/article/view/21209
CityDiplomacy.org 