Keywords

Introduction

The 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ impelled a shock that left a rocketing number of refugees for national governments to address, yet research has paid surprisingly little attention to the various facets of how intergovernmental relations (IGR) have shaped the management of that crisis. This is especially true for provision of language training for immigrants. Previous studies have largely neglected the question of how the web of conflicting policy interests, resulting in part from ambiguous responsibilities for financing and service provision, influences delivery of refugee integration. Responsibilities for provision, financing, and other aspects of each integration service are dispersed across numerous actors in a multi-dimension governance structure (Gruber & Rauhut, 2023). This is problematic in that governance structures of such a type may well exhibit the classic ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ phenomenon, a dilemma highlighted starkly in prior work (Scholten, 2016). Moreover, multi-dimensional governance structures reveal complex, many-faceted intergovernmental relations and tend to be characterised by conflicted policy processes. Against that background, this chapter examines how language training for refugees has been organised and implemented in Finland and Sweden since the 2015 refugee crisis. While Sweden has a long history of generous reception of refugees, Finland has accepted them in only very low numbers (Laine & Rauhut, 2018). Given the recognised importance of language proficiency as a key tool for growing integrated into a new country, comparing two advanced welfare states that differ in their manner and degree of applying this tool should yield valuable findings elucidating how externally imposed shocks affect the IGR.

Several trends in the conflict-rife policy processes can be identified. First, conflicts exist in relation to the service-delivery chain, which is arranged along function lines, in which territory-aligned tensions emerge locally (i.e., at municipal rather than regional or national level). Secondly, broad-based resurgence in political realms, with entities at subnational level asserting themselves, has brought greater opportunities for subnational actors to strengthen their position relative to the central government in many countries. Thirdly, the rise of network governance has meant that formal government institutions (at local, regional, and central levels alike) have lost some of their dominance in welfare-service provision, thereby creating potential to generate new tensions in the IGR (see Bergström et al., 2022). Fourthly, the marketization of welfare services can be seen as a potential element which further complicates IGR and makes them even more conflictive (see Gruber & Rauhut, 2023). Because all these trends influence language training for refugees, one can reasonably assume that conflicts between governance levels will percolate to those services’ provision, financing, and associated accountability structures. Hence, our focus here is on how the governance system functions in practice, especially when that system comes under stress.

Over the last decade, two major refugee flows have reached Europe: the one accompanying the 2015 crisis, a flow prompted mainly by the civil war in Syria, and that following Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine in early 2022. In both Finland and Sweden, the subsequent surge in refugee numbers imposed significant pressure for prompt processing of asylum applications and for response to the service needs of more refugees than ever before. Any country that offers refuge to persons in need of protection must commit itself to taking responsibility for the resettlement process, which encompasses housing, education, work, etc. (UNHCR, 2018). Moreover, the receiving country, by doing so, accepts the costs involved, even if those costs prove high (Rauhut et al., 2023).

Through a literature review following the method of content analysis, this chapter presents the organisation and implementation of language training for refugees in Finland and Sweden. We start by describing the crucial issues in the political context that tie in with that language education in the two countries, then offer theory-grounded elaboration on how IGR arrangements influence integration services such as language training. We can then characterise how immigrant language training is organised in Finland and Sweden, before proceeding to assess how that organisation has been affected by conflicted policy processes. The chapter concludes with a summative evaluation and suggestions for further research.

The Political Context

The political context must be understood as a wider political landscape not immune to external pressures on central–local relations in the two states. Migration has hurtled up the political agenda in both countries. With this development, Sweden lost its once-strong reputation for welcoming refugees, in the wake of the riots of Easter 2022. The ascendancy of a conservative government upon that year’s parliamentary elections constituted a turning point. Sweden’s new prime minister declaring that integration and the multicultural project have failed, the government now in office tightening up on residency, and associated policy moves all point to a changing environment that is most likely already affecting the central–local relations of migrant-teaching policy. Finland’s equivalent lurch to the right, with the new government of early 2023 implementing an austerity programme and cutting back on immigration, represents a similar turning point.

Refugee-linked shocks put pressure of various sorts on any country receiving refugees: administrative systems and governance structures need to adjust to a higher-volume flow of refugees; resources have to be reallocated, to meet the new demands; there must be staffing for the services given to refugees, etc. (see Bansak et al., 2021; Bodvarsson & Van der Berg, 2013). In conditions of resource availability not getting adjusted to address a refugee surge, one would expect heightened conflict—on several fronts, not only within the confines of a given governance level but also across boundaries between levels (Rauhut et al., 2023).

Although Finland has a highly restrictive policy for refugee reception, the years considered in our study did see it accept more refugees than before. In contrast, Sweden, traditionally a high-profile receiving country, accepted Europe’s second-highest number of refugees by 2015’s rankings (Laine & Rauhut, 2018; see also Oehlert and Kuhlmann, in this volume). Both countries saw a dip in numbers more recently: fewer people from Ukraine have sought refuge there than arrived from the Middle East amid the 2015 crisis (Rauhut et al., 2022).

In Finland, implementing language education is a responsibility of municipalities, private enterprises, and the third sector. The municipalities receive a portion of their income in the form of a general state block transfer in which the amount transferred reflects each municipality’s number of immigrants, although there is no requirement to put these funds towards integration activities or their support (Saukkonen, 2020). In addition, the municipalities in Finland receive government compensation for additional costs incurred in relation to immigrant-integration services, limited to the first three years of migrants’ residency (per Finnish law 1386/2010). In Sweden too, the implementation of language education for refugees rests in the hands of the municipalities (Hansson et al., 2023). Their costs for the language education are covered for the first two years, after which the municipalities must finance the language education for refugees themselves (Gruber & Rauhut, 2023; see also Oehlert and Kuhlmann, in this volume).

In the Nordic countries, language proficiency is considered a prerequisite for the successful integration of immigrants (Hansson et al., 2023); hence, the locale where a migrant lives has a key role in supporting integration. In consequence of its importance, Swedish law since 2021 has required refugees to participate in language classes (Riksdagen, 2021). In Finland, on the other hand, language courses are provided for recently arrived unemployed adults but not made compulsory (under law 1386/2010). Although, as noted above, the municipalities are compensated for the costs of the first two years’ language education in Sweden, and the first three years’ in Finland, bearing the full burden after that may constitute a mounting economic commitment at municipal level as the number of refugees increases over time. Especially amid refugee shocks, significant economic pressure has hit the municipalities through their responsibility to provide the required integration services for immigrants. Hence, the spikes in 2015 and 2022 imply fiscal difficulties for municipalities after a two-year lag in Sweden and a three-year lag in Finland.

Intergovernmental Relations

Relations between levels of government are imperfect, and friction always occurs at their seams. Local and regional governments may hold constitutional rights to oppose central government policies when dissenting views arise. Disagreement on the rules of the game, in particular, may bring forth contestation and non-systematic, fragmented IGR. In the case of immigrant services, these disagreements stem largely from asymmetric power relations. Namely, notwithstanding the extensive autonomy of municipalities in both countries (Kettunen, 2021b), it is difficult for them to refuse to let any refugees be resettled within their jurisdiction, even though the receiving municipality necessarily takes on a long-term economic commitment whereby municipal priorities shift away from supplying basic welfare services (e.g., Rauhut et al., 2023). Caught in this tension, the municipalities are left to make decisions on how to distribute their scarce resources, decisions for which they often obtain little guidance from above and that do not always gain voter support from below. While handling of refugee language training is highly decentralised, asymmetric power relations anchor it to the centre. This issue forms the heart of the conflicted policy process.

The central government authorities of Finland and Sweden have differed in their response to the associated co-ordination challenges (Bergström et al., 2022). Their response is linked to the first two of the four trends mentioned earlier. While Finland has chosen to align itself with the system preferred by the EU, with administration and co-ordination competencies concentrated at regional level, Sweden has retained its pre-EU-membership approach, wherein these competencies are centralised locally and nationally. In Finland, welfare services’ production and provision have traditionally been a municipal-level concern, but the ability of the numerous small municipalities across the country to provide, produce, and manage services of an adequate standard is increasingly limited. The problematic administrative legacy of these governance units’ legal obligations for equity and accessibility, combined with belt-tightening and long-term demographic trends, creates a knotty problem further compounded by spiralling health costs. Two approaches to this problem have been proposed in Finland: bolstering resources through municipalities’ merging/enlargement (Vuorenkoski, 2007) and addressing the administrative issue of unit size and capabilities by transferring most education, social, and health services upward, to a new level of elected regional officials. In 2023 Finland began corresponding reforms (Finnish Government, 2023), similar to administrative reforms carried out in Norway in 2020 (Kommunesektorens intresseorganisasjon, 2020); implemented in Denmark in 2007 (Kommunernes Landsforening, 2023); and recommended for Sweden, also in 2007, by a commission report (Finansdepartmentet, 2007) but never implemented. The changes proposed for Sweden, which lacked political support regionally and locally, were aimed at, among other results, stronger regional and local finances, coupled with redefinition of the responsibilities and service-provision obligations falling to each governance level. Swedish municipalities’ protestation over growth in the cost burden related to language training and immigrant-integration activities should be seen as a natural outgrowth of that IGR reform effort’s failure.

From this theoretical angle, one would expect power asymmetries between levels of government with respect to responsibility, provision, and financing to culminate in conflicted policy processes for relevant integration services. Next, we examine what has unfolded in practice.

Language Training in Finland

Language education as a public service in Finland (taking the form of integration courses) is available only for recently arrived refugees, who constitute a mere trickle in the immigrant stream. At the national level, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment is responsible for co-ordinating integration policy, which encompasses these courses. Alongside it, though, the Ministry of Education and Culture has a say in the contents of the integration courses. These two ministries account for the bulk of the integration budget, which comes to roughly 400 million euros between then annually. The integration courses are run by a mixture of municipalities and private companies, and they combine language studies with orientation to the host society and Finnish working life (Shemeikka et al., 2021).

However ambitious the goals set, the language-learning results produced by the integration courses are not encouraging. Although the formal goal is B1 proficiencyFootnote 1—ability to understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, and other such contexts and to deal with most situations likely to arise while the person is travelling in an area where the language is spoken—only about a third of the participants reach this level (Saukkonen, 2020). In addition, the learning outcomes from the courses are not systematically assessed, and course quality varies greatly. Even the content is far from uniform: integration courses sometimes are tightly bundled with vocational studies, and in other cases they very much are not (Kettunen, 2020).

Local governments are responsible for the wellbeing of local residents, so they have a clear incentive to get refugees onto the employment rolls (Kettunen, 2021a). The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment has earmarked funding to several of Finland’s larger cities for advising and counselling unemployed migrants, who often have a refugee background. However, conditions are set to change in 2025, when this becomes entirely the responsibility of the municipalities. There are lingering doubts as to whether municipalities will have a strong enough incentive to provide these services in the absence of such dedicated transfers (Saukkonen, 2020).

Thorough coverage by language studies in this context requires the third sector’s involvement. For instance, it is these players who invite additional people to the integration courses. However, the field remains fragmented: continuing studies, with more systematic language courses, are not free of charge, and poor language skills remain a major factor in refugees’ difficulties with finding work or study places. Hence, low-threshold work, from cleaning to food transport, offers a popular alternative. The importance of language skills is acknowledged, though, and several proposals have been put forward. One of them is to encourage supporting the language studies of one’s employees (Shemeikka et al., 2021). Also, under a bill proposed in connection with the Integration Act, integration training is envisioned as including a final exam in the Finnish or Swedish language. The support scheme for independent studies would be amended such that immigrants’ opportunities to develop their skills does not suffer even if the duration allocated by their integration plan for assimilation were to be shortened (Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, 2022).

This state of affairs showcases state-level acknowledgement of the importance of language skills (government proposal HE 208/2022) while the implementation of language education remains in the hands of municipalities, commercial entities, and the third sector. Perhaps the most jarring aspect of this disconnect is evident in the general state transfer, which is contingent on the number of immigrants to the municipality yet has no strings guaranteeing direction of the funds to integration activities. Policy that mirrors the ethos of Finnish society might offer some explanation. At state level, Kurki et al. (2017) have argued, the integration policy is aimed at immigrants being motivated, proactive, and responsible. In a sense, the principle of Finland’s language-education policy is that, at base, individuals are the ones responsible for this. In essence, the system assumes that integration has already been achieved.

Language Training in Sweden

Meanwhile in Sweden, the allocation of competencies and discretion among the various governance levels exhibits a lack of coherence. While the central government controls policies related to social issues, education, and the labour market, the municipalities are in charge of housing issues (Emilsson, 2015; Gruber & Rauhut, 2023), and it is the same local entities that are mandated to handle adult education and language training, including Swedish for Immigrants (SFI). In practice, municipalities subcontract private actors and NGOs to manage both language training aimed at refugees (Skolinspektionen, 2021a; Statskontoret, 2009) and the adult education and civics courses for them (Hernes & Trondstad, 2014; Skolinspektionen, 2020). Hence, although responsibility for language training is formally vested in the municipalities, the provision is almost always done by private parties locally.

The balance is mired in the above-mentioned context of central government remuneration for most of the first two years’ expenses for immigrant integration (Hoekstra et al., 2017) after which the municipality must find its own way, financing the integration by itself. Therefore, the role of market forces in the integration work, including language training, performed at the local level should come as no great surprise (Gruber & Rauhut, 2023; see also Oehlert and Kuhlmann, in this volume). With refugee flows to Sweden swelling vastly, many asylum-seekers have had to wait as long as two years before beginning their language training (Öbrink Hobzová, 2021). In such cases, the problem gets exacerbated: all costs for their language education are borne by the municipalities. Without the benefit of the two-year compensation window, the municipalities are left to finance the receiving of refugees from their annual operating budget. Conflict is ready to sprout from this crack between the national and local level.

Another noteworthy piece of the picture in Sweden is that refugees are obliged by law to improve their proficiency in Swedish through the above-mentioned SFI courses, free of charge to them (Riksdagen, 2021). The reason articulated for this education obligation dating from 2021 is that it is supposed to strengthen the individual immigrant’s opportunities for gainful employment (Socialstyrelsen, 2021). In practice, though, many municipalities had long had such requirements in place, because they have a legal right to propose actions whereby recipients of social assistance become more competitive in the labour market (Blomberg et al., 2006). This may reflect the uneven pace of the considerable changes wrought in Sweden’s language-training system for immigrants—affecting its organisation but also its stated and real-world aims, partly by dint of the financial situation facing municipalities. In earlier years, integration-related language courses targeted immigrants who had already secured work in Sweden, but today the participants by overwhelming majority are asylum-seekers. One effect of the system’s incomplete adjustment to this development is that the structure of the country’s language-training programmes for immigrants is poorly equipped to deal with groups who lack a solid basic education (Öbrink Hobzová, 2021).

Side Effects of Conflict-Ridden Policy Processes

In IGR environments characterised by conflicted policy processes, the implementation—in this case, of language education for refugees—should be expected to display various forms of distortion. When the IGR involve actors of equal strength, the most prominent power relations—presumably symmetrical—lead to less distortion, while in conditions of asymmetry, wherein one actor is able to assert dominance over the other, the weaker one can be assumed to exert a distorting influence on the policy implementation, with some of the outcomes nearly inevitably proving unfavourable for some. Both countries considered here feature a playing field where a dominating central government obtrudes its policies on local governments. Meagre returns on a policy with lofty goals might reflect more than bad implementation; one can view it also as a move on the board, by which the weaker party may strive to force the stronger one to renegotiate the conditions. By subcontracting the services and/or providing low-quality services, the municipalities keep their costs as low as possible while technically fulfilling the mandate from the central government. Hence, low-quality language-education services for refugees produced at low cost should be examined as a predictable, and hence power-bearing, side effect of the conflicted policy processes in the IGR or even as inherent to such conditions of tension.

The Finnish integration system has been modelled as a funnel (Saukkonen, 2020) through which services benefit only a small subset of the immigrant population. At the core of this system are the integration-training courses, through which newly arrived unemployed immigrants, mainly refugees, may obtain both language education and basic knowledge of Finland. Crucially, the quality of this language education varies greatly (see HE 208/2022), and it is not systematic. There is no assurance whatsoever of adequate proficiency in either of the country’s official languages (Finnish or Swedish) resulting, even though that competence is vital for further studies and working life. At present, it is up to the immigrants themselves to find ways of learning the language (Kurki & Brunila, 2014).

In Sweden, in turn, the Public Employment Office (PES) at the national level finances the language education for refugees, but here too the municipalities hold the reins of implementation—it is their responsibility to offer SFI (Hansson et al., 2023). Revealingly, there is little communication between the PES and the municipalities (IAF, 2020). This chasm suggests that the vertical IGR do not work as intended. Pushing costs onto other actors, whether vertically or horizontally, inevitably cultivates conflict-laden processes between the actors in question. A good example is evident in how the PES and other national arms press costs onto municipalities’ shoulders. Tension-bearing policy processes in vertical IGR have formed accordingly. Moreover, the language proficiency of the teachers utilised by the suppliers of SFI courses varies greatly, as does their pedagogic competence in adult education (Skolinspektionen, 2018). This implies that horizontal relations too—between the purchaser (the municipality) and the service provider (the private company or NGO)—are not functioning as intended. At the nub of the matter is the municipalities’ incentive to keep costs as low as possible with their subcontracting regime while delays redistribute the first two years’ expenses (Gruber & Rauhut, 2023). The IGR follow an economically rational pattern, then: either the subcontractors shift the high costs of certain cases to other agents (Spehar et al., 2017) or the quality of the services suffers (Riksrevisionen, 2015; Skolinspektionen, 2020, 2021a; Statskontoret, 2009, 2011). Because the service providers are economic actors operating in market conditions, they have strong economic incentives to attend to their activities’ profitability first, with few incentives in place that could offset such effects.

From the foregoing discussion, it appears that central government funding mechanisms in both countries tend to control the funds in quite mechanical ways—for example—by insisting on measures with fixed-term language and culture training rather than on meeting set goals for the learning. This approach could be understood as reducing local councils to agents of central government. One could say the same of the national government’s efforts to create incentives for local governments by rendering them responsible for any training beyond the fixed period. Here too, the central authorities leave little room for discretion and arguably encourage poor service based on input metrics rather than outcomes. Through actions rooted in its asymmetric relations with the municipalities, the national government fuels further conflict in the IGR.

Discussion

In recent years, Finland has allowed market principles to creep in alongside and within its implementation of traditional welfare services. Integration services exhibit the same pattern. The main argument made in Finland for the ‘marketisation’ of integration services is that private companies are more cost-efficient and possess greater flexibility for serving client needs. The associated policy shift has generated a boom in consulting business in the integration-services domain. When the resources directed to language education began groaning under the strain from larger numbers of refugees, opportunities for adequate learning results diminished, and public authorities responded by adjusting the system with an eye to flexibility. With the resulting realignment, teachers are transformed into teaching consultants as pedagogy gets shaped into delivery of the specified knowledge, and immigrants become transformed into clients responsible for their own success or failure (Kurki et al., 2017, 242). Few refugees are prepared for such a role of responsible party cum passive consumer. The greatest problem with this development is that the path towards integration is unclear (Brunila & Ryynänen, 2017; Kurki & Brunila, 2014). Although a new integration law, due in 2025 (HE 208/2022), has been drafted to afford more centralised control of the learning results by introducing language tests, it is not designed to eliminate the fragmented nature of the language-teaching system itself. In sum, that system, while providing the flexibility sought for the conditions newly facing Finnish society, remains at the same time unfair and has not been effective for systematic achievement of language learning.

The contracting out of integration-promoting services such as language courses, which is widespread in the practice of the municipalities in Sweden, has posed similar problems, leading to competition among providers to lower the costs, with a consequent decline in the quality of the service provided. Unsurprisingly, since profit maximisation is the top priority for a business-oriented company, service providers sideline the legal requirement for individualised study plans as much as possible in favour of cost-reducing one-size-fits-all education (see Skolinspektionen, 2021b). The communication gulf between the PES and the municipalities with regard to education obligations, identified as unacceptable by the Swedish Unemployment Insurance Inspectorate (IAF, 2020), is telling, yet it is a symptom rather than the biggest problem besetting PES–municipal relations. For instance, with the PES covering the costs of integration for only the two first years, one might well ask why the municipalities should bother to communicate with the central body after that span has elapsed. Thus, a pivotal conflict in IGR, documented well above and elsewhere, coalesces: the municipalities are unhappy, in diplomatic terms, with paying for the immigrants’ integration after the first two years have passed (SKR, 2017). It follows that, in a pattern paralleling that in Finland, SFI is subcontracted to private actors for cost-reduction purposes. The quality of the services corresponds to what the municipalities are prepared and, sometimes, just able to pay for.

While Spehar et al. (2017) and Gruber and Rauhut (2023) have pointed to a tendency for subcontractors to pick the more promising clients, to boost their success rate and maximise profits, indications of even murkier practices have emerged—not only municipalities but also human clients become ‘locked in’, with ethically dubious tactics employed to pressure them into additional language-training courses that might not even be needed.Footnote 2 Here too, the private actors pursue a goal of making more money, in the absence of balancing forces.

The rocketing number of refugees brought by the 2015 crisis imposed immense pressure on public finances in Sweden (Ruist, 2022) and in Finland (Saukkonen, 2020) both. This has been felt by the municipalities but also by the central government, so the necessity of keeping the costs as low as possible has led the actors at the two levels into a mutually adversarial stance in several respects. Sweden’s strained public finances did not permit Ukrainian refugees to enrol in the SFI system until the newly appointed right-wing government decided to finance this with SEK 100 million (approx. €9 million) in March 2023 (SKR, 2023). Thus far, the number of Ukrainians seeking refuge in Finland has been relatively low, and most of the relevant refugees, being uncertain about their plans for the future, have not registered for the integration courses (Ahvenainen et al., 2023).

Concluding Remarks

The findings from our examination of language training for refugees as implemented at the level of local authorities in Finland and Sweden suggest that the responsibility, implementation, and financing connected with refugees’ language training are blurred, on terrain marked by lines of tension. The analysis presented in this chapter indicates that the intergovernmental relations associated with immigrants’ language training in both countries are characterised by conflicted policy processes. Generally, any successful language training in these conditions takes place by chance and in an arbitrary manner. Our central conclusion is that insufficient financing and unclear responsibilities due to asymmetric power relations are bound to lead to a conflictual policy process, which has culminated in low-quality service provision from subcontractors along with implicit clientelism, casting the users as consumers. These findings are broadly consistent with the conclusions drawn in official evaluations of the language-training programmes in Finland and Sweden both (e.g., Kettunen, 2020; Riksrevisionen, 2015; Saukkonen, 2020; Shemeikka et al., 2021; Skolinspektionen, 2018, 2020, 2021a, 2021b; Statskontoret, 2009, 2011).

In Finland, responsibility for language training resides at national level: integration issues are explicitly to be dealt with by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment. The situation has been much less stable in Sweden, where integration issues fell under the Ministry of Social Affairs for a long time but then moved to the Ministry of Justice in 2015. Multiple voids have emerged here. From time to time, immigration and integration issues have been left entirely without government portfolios (Hoekstra et al., 2017). Upon 2008’s shuttering of the National Integration Board (or Integrationsverket), a public authority working with immigrant integration, work connected with integration was distributed among other government authorities (Swedish Government, 2008). Later, after the red–green coalition government was replaced by a right-wing government in 2022, integration issues became a duty of the Ministry of Employment (Swedish Government, 2023). Shuffling the responsibility for integration issues among various ministries gives the impression that nobody wants to be responsible for this ‘hot-potato’ realm of policy at the national level.

The haphazard implementation of language-teaching systems both in Finland and in Sweden implies that the conflicted policy processes in the IGR constitute a negative influence on language education in such a context. There is evidence that people at delivery level are left to make decisions about the distribution of scarce resources while given little guidance yet still presumably holding considerable liability for blame should major problems arise. In many cases, the central government has experienced pressure to legislate for some imagined ‘ideal’ situation rather than the reality on the ground. While further comparative analyses of national practices dovetailing with other levels and of well-functioning systems in related areas (e.g., labour-market-introduction programmes) are necessary to flesh out our understanding, one thing is abundantly clear: the current conditions of tension do not facilitate immigrants’ integration into the communities where they live. Future work on the issues highlighted here could valuably inform efforts towards theory and practice addressing the complexity and multifaceted nature of these multi-dimensional governance systems, with all their pros and cons, and of the IGR frames within which they operate. Research along these lines is certain to produce interesting findings.