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An explanatory framework based on the classic resource dependency perspective is used to explain a broad variety of urban government-interest group interactions that are not fully explained by current urban governance theories. A case study of Dutch urban immigrant integration shows that one must combine considerations of information and intermediation capacity to explain why Dutch urban governments interact with immigrant organizations, in addition to common findings about institutional heritage. Their information and intermediation capacity allows local governments to get in touch quickly with immigrant groups during periods that potentially threaten the social order and public safety and creates incentives to maintain grants and keep in touch, whereas contributions of such groups to effective implementation are at least doubted.

Immigrant integration has become an intractable policy controversy in the Netherlands. One facet of this controversy involves the different ways in which immigrant integration has been framed by national and local governments. National government has formulated a "citizenship approach" to immigrant integration, whereas local governments often chose a more accommodative approach to migrant groups. In this article, the authors argue that this discrepancy originates from the divergent institutional logic of national and local integration policies. National integration policies have resulted from belief in strong central policy coordination, a sharp turn from depoliticization to politicization, responsiveness to a series of focus events, and mood swings during the past decades. Local integration policies, in contrast, are characterized by a considerable degree of pragmatic problem coping, in particular, the instrumental use of migrant organizations. As such, the divergent logics of national and local integration policies seem to represent two different worlds of problem framing.

Redistributive policies concerning migrants in The Netherlands bear a striking degree of ethnic specificity. This characteristic seems to follow from the doctrine `integration with maintenance of own culture' that has long informed Dutch minority policies. However, both central and local governments stopped subscribing to this doctrine at least a decade ago, while ethnically specific policy arrangements have continued to grow. This article explains the anomaly from an administrative mechanism: the logic of categorization for policy-making contradicts the logic of policy implementation. The use of what we call `replacement categories' creates an administrative opportunity structure that unintentionally promotes ethnic fragmentation. We examine the workings of this mechanism in a case study of minority policy in The Netherlands.