The Tricky Thing of Implementing Migration Policies: Insights from Return Policies in Sweden

How bureaucrats implement contested migration policies, such as return, and its enforcement, strikes at the heart of the most central debate within the migration control literature. An ongoing debate in this literature also concerns the Gap hypothesis, namely that there is a gap between goals of national immigration policy (laws, regulation, etc.) and the actual results of policies in this area (policy outcomes). In this chapter, I address the question of what characterises implementation success and failure, in particular, what role organisational context plays. Based on a Lundquist’s framework (Implementation Steering: An Actor-Structure Approach, 1987), I focus on three aspects: understanding, ability and willingness to implement decisions. These aspects are analysed using examples from Sweden based on fieldwork data collected and analysed within the Return and Reintegration project at the Migration Studies Delegation 2018–2019. The chapter highlights the role of street-level bureaucracy in the implementation of enforcement and return policy in Sweden and also touch upon some important features due to the Covid-19 pandemic that affected implementation. Results indicate that there is an ‘implementation gap’ meaning a disparity between policies on paper and implementation in this field due to lack of understanding, ability and willingness inside the bureaucracy.