Italy hosts significant numbers of forced migrants throughout its territory. The implementation of asylum policy thus occurs in diverse and sometimes fraught contexts, presenting different resources and obstacles. This paper examines how local context shapes the experiences and practices of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) implementing policy in the Italian statutory asylum system. Semi-structured interviews with workers in two projects, one in a conservative rural area and one in a progressive urban area, show that the urban/rural divide alone is not an appropriate predictor of similarities and differences in policy implementation and outcomes, which are largely shaped by context-specific sociocultural and relational elements. Workers’ off-duty mediation in interpersonal contact between migrants and community members fosters positive encounters that could partially offset traditionally conservative political cultures and hostile attitudes; however, the same cultures and attitudes cause workers to feel isolated and alienated from their community. Furthermore, SLBs’ decision-making practices in both projects are always collegial and constrained by exhaustive rules, largely eliminating the need for individual discretion typical of SLBs and creating instead “group discretionary” bureaucrats. In light of these findings, I argue for increased attention to locality beyond the simple urban versus rural lens, and increased focus on asylum SLBs as a distinct category of “doubly embedded” SLBs participating in both policy implementation and local context.

中文翻译：

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社区联系：了解意大利庇护政策实施的当地动态


意大利在其领土上收容了大量被迫移民。因此，庇护政策的实施发生在各种有时令人担忧的环境中，呈现出不同的资源和障碍。本文研究了当地环境如何塑造街道级官僚 （SLB） 在意大利法定庇护系统中实施政策的经验和做法。对两个项目（一个在保守的农村地区，一个在进步的城市地区）的工人进行半结构化访谈表明，仅靠城乡鸿沟并不能适当地预测政策实施和结果的相似性和差异性，这些差异在很大程度上是由特定背景的社会文化和关系因素决定的。工人在下班后调解移民和社区成员之间的人际接触，促进了积极的接触，可以部分抵消传统上保守的政治文化和敌对态度;然而，相同的文化和态度导致工人感到孤立和疏远他们的社区。此外，SLB 在这两个项目中的决策实践总是合议的，并受到详尽规则的约束，在很大程度上消除了 SLB 典型的个人自由裁量权的需要，而是创造了“集体自由裁量”官僚主义。鉴于这些发现，我主张在简单的城市与农村视角之外增加对地方性的关注，并更多地关注庇护 SLB 作为参与政策实施和当地环境的“双重嵌入”SLB 的一个独特类别。