Pilot projects

Integration is multidimensional and occurs in different domains of life in specific social spaces where people interact and build new forms of identification and belong, individually and collectively. While integration policy may be developed at central level, integration practice is necessarily contextualized at regional and local level. Regions and municipalities are the core contexts where people relate to institutions and participate economically, socially, culturally and politically. As such, contextualization ensures that integration measures are relevant and coherent with local priorities and can lead to a relative “specialization” in different sectors or dimensions of Third Country Nationals’ integration. 

This component recognizes regional and local authorities as integration protagonists. It leverages on the added value of the diversity of experiences and expertise, and encourages these actors to share, learn from others to innovate or replicate successful practices that respond to local needs. Each co-applicant is piloting an integration action at regional/local level, developing a specific monitoring framework to distil lessons learned and assess progress in implementation, as well as the actions’ potential for replication or scaling up.  

In this framework, co-applicants designed a pilot integration action that responds to their contextual priorities and needs, organizational structure, knowledge, capacity and resources. The pilot actions are structured around the five thematic areas of the EU Action Plan on Integration of TCNs. The pilot actions embed social innovation, gender- and age-sensitive approaches and can be implemented in collaboration with local partners (e.g. social innovators, employers, social partners, civil society organizations, faith-based organizations, etc.). Ultimately, the pilot actions do not only benefit regional and local authorities by enhancing their integration planning and implementation capacity, but most importantly, they concretely enhance TCNs’ integration in the contexts where the pilots are implemented.