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Objectives and Governance

The Urban Agenda Partnership on Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees

In 2016, under the Dutch Presidency of the Council of the EU, the ‘Urban Agenda for the EU’ was launched to give European cities a greater say in shaping EU legislation, funding, and instruments for knowledge exchange. The initiative brought together cities, Member States and EU policymakers around 12 priority areas key to cities’ future—each area covered by a dedicated Partnership. With large-scale newcomer arrivals in 2015-16 highlighting the limits of conventional approaches to reception/integration and calling for more coordinated responses across different stakeholders and levels of governance, the Urban Agenda Partnership on Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees was created with the goal to improve migrant and refugee inclusion in the medium- and long term.  

Over the past five years, the Partnership has developed into an effective, outcome-oriented platform for eye-level cooperation and trust-building between cities, Member States, EU institutions, and other stakeholders such civil society actors, international associations, think tanks, as well as migrants and refugees themselves. Since its launch, the Partnership has been co-led by the City of Amsterdam and the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs (DG HOME). Its diverse membership has maintained a stable core, which has helped ensure continuity, while remaining open for new members to join and enrich the initiative with their experience, thinking and resources. Partnership Members play a pivotal role: they identify bottlenecks related to integration, conceptualise actions to address these challenges, and provide resources, knowledge and networks for these actions’ implementation. In addition, one of the key strengths of the Partnership is its ability to engage and involve external partners in pursuing its objectives; this way, the actions benefit from external expertise and capacity in a needs-oriented way, broadening the Partnership’s operational capacity and amplifying its impact.