Cyprus Presidency of EU: Role of local and regional authorities and communities

The ninth Common Basic Principle, "The participation of immigrants in the democratic process and in the formulation of integration policies and measures, especially at the local level, supports their integration", has been inadequately implemented in the Member States. The third edition of MIPEX (which includes integration indicators for 31 countries of Europe and North America) concludes that most immigrants have few opportunities to inform and improve the policies which affect them daily.
On a positive side one can see the potential for the development of a more effective system of monitoring and implementing integration policies via a system of standard-setting, benchmarking, measuring the process and evolution on the basis of social indicators. However, as is apparent from the declaration of the European Ministerial Conference on Integration at Zaragoza, there was no agreement on developing a  genuine system of binding indicators to properly compare and evaluate integration policies: the matter was relegated to an annex and referred to a potential to be explored in the future. Only a pilot study was agreed upon...
The process of developing integration indicators is  currently  under way and there has been a number of expert meetings organised working in the fields of  employment,  education and  Social Inclusion/Active Citizenship. Another project, the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), has developed a comparative system of indicators from the different policy areas between different countries. Such a ranking system is a particularly useful policy tool to compare and contrast how each country is doing in the various policies, as well getting a global picture on the EU as a whole (and beyond). However, the main criticism is the attempt to reduce the complexity of contextual reality into percentage numbers and abstract graphs, often missing some dynamic issues which are irreducible to numbers. Other studies, like the one referred above, take a more qualitative and contextual approach to comparison.  It is crucial here to stress that, at least so far, there is not yet consensus among the EU Member States on making such a regime more robust and shaping common indicators, because, some argue, they do not share same policy priorities in terms of policy goals, reflecting the different political and ideological backgrounds and motives of the various actors in EU and national policy-making...As shown by the Third MIPEX study, there is considerable difference between different member states as to the extent they have implemented the integration acquis, both the ‘hard law’ and the ‘soft law’ measures...

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