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Abstract

When it comes to public policies that recognize and accommodate ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, cities are active and innovative. However, policy adoption can differ greatly from case to case, with different policy processes leading to different types of instruments across local contexts. This paper focuses on two cases from France, a country usually associated with hostility towards recognizing group-based diversity. In Marseille, there has been a decades-long consensus around group-based multiculturalism. The impetus has come from mayors (“policy entrepreneurs”) of both the centre-left and the centre-right. In Grenoble, the uninterrupted dominance of a strong left-wing administration has infused diversity policy with more traditional themes, such as anti-discrimination, universalist participation and civil-society support in the city's stigmatized southern neighbourhoods. The study demonstrates that local-level diversity policy may feature a mix of multicultural, intercultural and universalist elements, and that tracing local policy processes can explain puzzling policy outcomes.