In Belgium, competences of migration (e.g., asylum and family reunification) and so-called “integration” (e.g., education, work and housing) are divided between federal, regional and municipal governance levels, while support services are dispersed across a range of civil society organizations and state actors. Such complexity combines with lack of central coordination, to create substantial ‘policy gaps.’ We know surprisingly little, however, about the effects of this complex institutional configuration on the psychosocial well-being of newcomers and on their ability to “integrate” into the Belgian society. This lack of knowledge is puzzling as so-called “integration” dominates public debates on migration and asylum.

REFUFAM provides evidence on the impact of ‘policy gaps’ and emergent support structures by focusing on one particular group: refugees and their family members. The research design of this project consists of three interconnected pillars, building on different disciplines: a legal-political stream examining the institutional configuration of Belgium’s asylum and integration policies; a psychosocial pillar analysing refugee families’ psychosocial well-being; and a socio-spatial unit documenting families’ local inclusion pathways.

REFUFAM innovatively takes refugee families’ everyday lives and their experiences at the centre of policy analysis. Most studies on refugees’ road to employment, for instance, focus exclusively on individuals, aggregated by nationality, education or legal status. Similarly, we have limited knowledge on how complex family dynamics shape individual refugees’ aspirations in terms of finding a place to live, a job, or acquiring new educational degrees. Recent research, however, has convincingly shown that refugees’ family lives – including individual gendered and generational positions within families – are crucial to understand their complex experience of so-called “integration”.

REFUFAM’s impact is situated at 4 levels: government policies, practitioners, scholarly debates and the broader public. First, we will provide evidence-based recommendations on how government policies can facilitate refugee families’ “integration” process. Second, the project engages regularly with practitioners, to strengthen their skills in supporting refugee families. Third, the project impacts scholarly debates on refugee families’ integration policies as one of only a handful of studies providing a systematic overview of the multiple dimensions of refugee families so-called “integration”. Fourth, REFUFAM’s researchers and supervisors contributes to public debates by intervening with systematic empirical evidence through media interventions and a booklet targeting the broad national and international audience.