Focusing on the contracted provision of accommodation, supervision, and care to asylum seekers in Switzerland, this doctoral thesis sheds ethnographic light on the day-to-day discourses, practices, and effects of outsourced asylum reception on the ground. It proposes a thorough analysis of the subcontracting of a sovereign task to the private sphere, not only in terms of the conception of public policy, but also in terms of accountability and opportunities for negotiating politics.
More specifically, it investigates how three private state-mandated organizations, and their agents, negotiate daily the reception of asylum seekers under the influence of shifting governance and managerial regimes. It sheds light on the critical location of street-level organizations – structurally situated at the interface between the state, its policies, and individuals – and on the way they determine the actual content of public policy through daily, informal and discretionary practices.
This doctoral thesis explores the process by which reception policy is governed by and through private intermediaries, namely, street-level organizations, but also instruments and logics from the private sphere. It shows that if this configuration of government is banal in its principles and has long prevailed in the Swiss reception landscape, it is instead in the distribution and proportion of public and private, but also in the articulation of the rationalities that run through it, that such configuration is specific. Similarly, by adopting a meso-political perspective including the structural, organizational, infrastructural, and individual dimensions which inform the governance of reception, this thesis goes beyond a purely individualizing understanding or, conversely, one that focuses solely on structure, to articulate a plurality of actors and spaces in the analysis of asylum reception.
Overall, this research highlights the intricacies of the broader dynamics of the privatization of state action, that is, the sophisticated, yet also (in)visible processes of diffusion of private intermediaries in the governance of reception. It shows how privatization – at first sight a coherent and homogeneous process – is composed of several transversal dynamics, sometimes unintentional or contradictory, produced by public and private actors. These include, for example, the contractualization, commodification and neoliberal bureaucratization of reception, its managerialization and humanitarianization, but also its depoliticization.
In addressing these issues, this dissertation puts forward other dimensions of outsourcing processes that remain obscure in the social and political science literature. It illuminates the processes at work in the neoliberal redeployment of the (welfare) state in governing reception, in particular through the shifting of the political task of implementing reception policy – and its contradictory objectives – to the operational sphere, the diversification of street-level organizations, and thus of the moral dispositions towards reception, the proliferation of bureaucratic and neoliberal formalities, and the resulting dilution of responsibilities. It is thus the account of the deconstruction of binary categories: the state, the non-state, the public, the private, the formal and the informal, but also proximity and distance, welfare and repression.
