Burden, benefit, gift or duty? Dutch mayors’ framing of the multilevel governance of asylum in rural localities and cities in Zeeland

ABSTRACT This article engages with critiques of multilevel governance (MLG) perspectives on asylum governance and identifies two additional points of concern. First, it highlights the importance of empirically grounding reflections on the limits of the MLG approach, beyond the activism of city actors, by examining local asylum dynamics from the vantage point of mayors in rural and small urban municipalities. It examines how Dutch mayors in rural and small urban municipalities in the Dutch province of Zeeland experienced and framed asylum governance in a multilevel setting between 2015 and 2016. Second, this article brings into focus internal dynamics, interactions between mayors and municipal actors within the municipality, alongside external interactions and pre-existing local and regional challenges, such as rural crisis. It argues that even in the context of cooperative modes of governance, mayors navigate various challenges. In terms of framing, this article shows how mayors in this multilevel context commonly framed municipal involvement in asylum governance as a duty rather than as a burden or benefit to their localities. It argues that this framing reflects a local ‘politics of consensus’ rather than ‘local pragmatism’.