The Europe for Citizens Programme of the European Commission is funding a multi-country, municipal focused project to encourage learning and development of innovative practices in the area of refugee integration. Municipal officials from Lithuania, Finland, Sweden, Italy, and Montengro are participating in a series of international workshops and activities for this purpose. This paper and presentation reports on interviews conducted with key municipal leaders from each jurisdiction and a survey conducted of a broader cross-section of municipal agency managers, representing operating units in which municipal employees are likely to interact with or address situations related to refugees and refugee integration.
Through the analysis, we identify the leadership context both within the organization, the broader municipality, and the surrounding community. Within and across these contexts, we identify leadership competencies and characteristics that are potentially contributory of certain integration outcomes: trust between refugees and municipal officials, cultural awareness of municipal officials, cultural understanding of refugees, felt belongingness with community, among them.
Theoretically, this research considers the shifting context of the municipal leaders’ role with the introduction of linguistic, cultural, religious, ethnic, and racial diversity of the population being served. This kind of diversity introduction has not before been experienced in such a way, if at all. The ideas of distributed leadership may be significant, as other “traditional” leadership approaches (transformational, transactional, and so on), but it may be that the leadership competencies and the locations of leadership need to be reconsidered, with potential conflict between potentially “conservative” bureaucratic structures and workforce norms, and the need to adapt to new realities and ideas and ideals of citizenship. As such this is an exploratory study intended to elucidate ethical, tactical, and relational aspects of leadership performance and behavior within a culturally dynamic context, and with a focus on preparing municipal leaders, municipalities, and whole communities for the introduction and integration of refugees.
The participating municipalities are:
• Kalajoki, Finland. The town has a population of 12,567 and covers an area of 2,391.31 km2 of which 1,469.15 km2 is water. The municipality is unilingually Finnish.
• Malmö is the third largest city in Sweden and the 6th largest in the Nordic countries. The administrative entity for most of the city is Malmö Municipality, which has 309,105 inhabitants, 43% of whom have a foreign background.
• Kaunas is the second-largest city in Lithuania and is a leading centre of economic, academic, and cultural life. Ethnic composition in 2011, out of 315,933: Lithuanians – 93.6%; Russians – 3.8%; Other – 2.6%.
• Pordenone is the main commune of Pordenone province of northeast Italy. Foreign citizens amount to 15.5% of the town population. The three largest ethnic minorities are: Romania, 1,896; Ghana, 1,158; Albania, 1,129.
• Herceg Novi is a coastal town in Montenegro located at the entrance to the Bay of Kotor and at the foot of Mount Orjen. Population is 30,864. Density - 130/km2. Ethnicity: Montenegrins 33.68%; Serbs 49.44%; Undeclared 9.42%; Others 7.34%.
