ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we analyse the multilevel policy-making of refugee reception policies in Spain (with a particular focus on Madrid and Barcelona) and how implementation took place in an already conflictual institutional, political and territorial context and given the enormous rise in the number of asylum applications since 2015. For the analysis, we draw on policy documents and newspaper articles and on fifty interviews with the main stakeholders (conducted from April 2016 to January 2019). The chapter reaches two main conclusions. First, though a centralised system would seem to leave little room for significant divergencies in the functioning, accessibility and quality of reception services, the lack of a regulatory development gave huge space for discretion to civil society organisations (CSOs). Second, as shown for the cases of Madrid and Barcelona, the lack of coordination between different administrative levels led to policy decoupling, which introduced an important degree of divergence between different local contexts.
