Browsing by Subject "garbage can"

Concerning immigration and refugee issues, in politics, media and research, often the focus seems to be from an administrational point of view only the asylum process. However, especially in administration, refugee reception does not end in asylum decisions. This study examines organizational decision-making and public policy formation in the case of Finnish refugee reception, after granted residence permits. Instead of political decision-making, the focus is on how the issue is dealt with before authoritative politics, on the ministry level. The particular interest is municipal refugee resettlement, complemented with questions of ministry division of labor and connections between administrational and political levels, which emerged during the analysis. The time perspective is from the 1970s, the start of modern refugee reception, until today. The theoretical background is in the bounded rationality paradigm of organizational decision-making theories. The framework is more specifically a combination of the garbage can theory by Cohen, March and Olsen, and the agendas and alternatives approach to policy formation processes by Kingdon. The study analyses general development and 11 decision situations more closely. The ministry level documents of these situations are analyzed through interpretive content analysis, with coding and a strive to thick analysis. Based on the theories, load, effectivity, access structure, participation, agenda and the problems and solutions are looked at. After reflecting the streams and structures of this considered organized anarchy, it is concluded, that the long-term development path of refugee reception administration can not be seen as a classically rational and efficient progress, but more of a coincidental, chaotic and stalled process. Changes either go back and forth, like the responsible ministry, or stay very still, like the municipal resettlement compensation system. Even though solutions claimed to address problems and despite decisions, many problems persisted and resurfaced often. Decision-making is not only an activity of solving problems, but a collection of separate streams. There were problems looking for solutions and decision situations, but also decision situations looking for problems and solutions, and solutions looking for situations and problems. According to this analysis the process and outcomes are affected by features, such as context, load and structures. The theoretical background provided suitable concepts and definitions to examine this type of ambiguous policy field, with multiple actors, problems and solutions, and complex relations to politics. The strength of this framework is especially in distinguishing elements.