Austrian team of the MATILDE project, Carinthia University of Applied Sciences (CUAS) and the City of Villach, organized their first policy roundtable for setting the future course in local and regional migration and integration politics.

On Monday, 25th April 2022, the first policy roundtable of the WP6-leader Carinthia University of Applied Sciences (CUAS) in cooperation with the local partner, the City of Villach, took place. Participants already involved in the MATILDE research activities as well as important stakeholders at local and regional level in the context of migration and integration followed the invitation. They were a diverse group of people from public administration, NGOs and associations, private economy, schools and universities and representatives from the target group, third country nationals. In total, 44 people participated in the interactive roundtable.

Based on the existing empirical results, the CUAS policy team elaborated SWOT analyses for the local, regional, national and European level, derived challenges and negative consequences linked to the weaknesses and threats found for the different levels, and elaborated policy recommendations, possible positive impacts of these recommendations and suggested solutions on the basis of 28 months of qualitative, quantitative and participatory research in Villach, Carinthia and Austria.

The main topics discussed were asylum, politics, public administration, economy and employment, education, mobility, health, social connection as well as housing in the context of rural development at all political levels, from local to EU level.

After the presentation of the main research results prepared in the SWOT-analyses, the participants allocated to one of five round tables, where one or two of the aforementioned topics were moderated by a tandem and discussed in two rounds. Hence, every participant got the chance to contribute to maximum four out of eight topics within the roundtable discussion.

After the second round, the main discussion results were presented by the moderation tandem, in order to validate and prioritise the most important policy recommendations by each participant. Therefore, in Carinthia the future political priorities which should be set, are essentially determined by the people who are active in the field.

Within the next days, this output will be documented. The participants and some more interested stakeholders, will get the chance to give a final feedback on the validated policy recommendations. These results serve as a basis for the policy report, the roundtable report and the multi-dimensional policy-recommendation matrix.