The Urban Partnership on the 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.