Local innovation in the reception of asylum seekers in the Netherlands: Plan Einstein as an example of multi-level and multi-sector collaboration

Asylum seeker reception has proved something of a ‘wicked issue’, resulting in an impasse in decision-making at national and European levels, and ‘scale mismatch’ with local contexts where the problem manifests. The 2015–2016 refugee crisis provoked an opportunity for experimentation at the local level in European cities. This chapter provides an example of one such experiment: the Utrecht Refugee Launchpad, or ‘Plan Einstein’ as it is known locally, a new concept of asylum seeker reception and integration. It offered ‘futureproof’ skills development for asylum seekers and simultaneous benefits for local people from the neighbourhood through living and learning together. We discuss how the concept aimed to respond to existing challenges, how it adapted in practice and why the innovation was able to prosper at this specific moment. In particular, the chapter shows how through the development of multi-sector and multi-level alliances, the project was made appealing to different constituents for different reasons. The chapter also shows how the experiment resulted in the initiators manoeuvring within different political contexts and constraints locally and nationally. In this way, it did not challenge outright the existing structures through decoupling from the national level, but negotiated within these, to bring the concept into being