Interorganizational Decision-Making in Norwegian Refugee Resettlement

Although the literature on resettlement – the movement of refugees from their first country of asylum to a third country that can offer permanent residency and protection – is growing, we still know relatively little about how categories and criteria for the selection of refugees for resettlement are implemented in practice. We propose that to understand how refugees are selected for resettlement, it is useful to study the interorganizational encounters of national agencies involved in implementing the selection criteria of receiving states. Resettlement workers operate in a larger system of bureaucracies. In this paper we will focus on Norwegian practices of resettlement and the three Norwegian agencies involved – the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration, the Norwegian Directorate of Integration, and the Immigration Police. Drawing on street-level bureaucracy theory and ethnographic fieldwork among resettlement officers selecting refugees for resettlement to Norway, we ask how the different mandates and discretionary responsibilities influence how cooperating agencies implement the available criteria to select refugees for resettlement. We explore their division of labour, as well as distinct operational perspectives that sometimes produce contrasting reviews of the same cases, and how they resolve disagreement over resettlement decisions. In the context of the selection missions, the three agencies come to embody the multiple and sometimes conflicting aims and norms that guide Norwegian resettlement practices. Through an exploration of “trouble cases”, we provide insight into how epistemic perspectives and discretionary reasoning differ between the agencies and how these factors shape inter-agency collaboration and ultimately resettlement decisions.