Box-ticking exercise or real inclusion? Challenges of including refugees’ perspectives in EU policy

This empirical chapter investigates the intensions, expectations and conditions to create inclusion in policymaking advice at EU level. The findings are based on a qualitative study of the initiative “European Migrant Advisory Board” (EMAB) and engages with theoretical and methodological notions such as power, tokenism, deep democracy, co-creation and reflexivity. It challenges the limited approaches of inclusion of refugees’ voices such as required representativeness and argues for the necessity of multi-level reflexivity to enable genuine inclusion of different perspectives and voices. Reducing refugees’ perspectives into a homogenous category of representation fails, not only because of the heterogeneous reality of the group but also because of the impossibility to represent such group. The added value of refugees’ experiences and perspectives on board is based on its capacity to break the dominant normalized mindset and practice in the policy which is often disconnected from lived experiences of target groups for which the policy is made.