Remodelling (Un)certainty: Outsourcing and Auditing Refugee Reception in Switzerland

Abstract

AbstractBy approaching outsourcing through an ethnographic lens, this article focuses on the policies that enable public authorities to deal with the many uncertainties of refugee reception. It investigates how cantonal (subnational) governments in Switzerland remodel these uncertainties by implementing the policy of reception through private intermediaries, namely actors, instruments, and rationalities from the private sphere. The analysis shows that by thickening the interface between the decision-making and implementation spheres, these elements constitute a multilayer buffer zone that dilutes, absorbs, and also shifts the insecurities related to the governance of refugee reception. The article argues that the use of private intermediaries enables the state to ‘navigate within’ unpredictable temporalities and realities, but also to ‘govern through’ uncertainty as it is transferred and (re)produced in the implementation work carried out by the mandated organizations. This article thus apprehends uncertainty as a structural and organisational condition and a mechanism that together shape how different governmental actors engage with (the reception of) refugees.