Cities, forced migration, and multi-level governance: Assessing berlin's policy towards unaccompanied minors

This thesis aims to investigate the relationship between cities and forced migration and explores the increasing role of cities in the Multi-Level Governance of migration. It focuses on the intersection of the local turn in migration and vulnerable refugee groups, mainly unaccompanied minors. Focusing on Berlin through process tracing and single case method, the thesis assesses Berlin's policy toward the unaccompanied minors on the Greek islands in a time frame of the European Refugee Crisis in 2015 until March 2022. It discusses the multilevel nature of local policymaking in migration and its multifaceted drivers as it demonstrates Berlin's interaction with actors at the vertical and horizontal levels and the defining (institutional and structural) and transformative (local discourses and actors) drivers that feature in Berlin's migration policymaking. While this study proves that there is a local turn in migration and cities are no longer solely responsible for the implementation of policies, since they formulate them, particularly for unaccompanied minors, it also reveals that cities are still constrained by the institutional factors that shape their capabilities and limitations against national and supranational actors.