This article engages with critiques of multilevel governance (MLG) perspectives on asylum governance andidentifies two additional points of concern. First, it highlights the importance of empirically groundingreflections on the limits of the MLG approach, beyond the activism of city actors, by examining localasylum dynamics from the vantage point of mayors inrural and small urbanmunicipalities. It examineshow Dutch mayors in rural and small urban municipalities in the Dutch province of Zeeland experiencedand framed asylum governance in a multilevel setting between 2015 and 2016. Second, this articlebrings into focus internal dynamics, interactions between mayors and municipal actors within themunicipality, alongside external interactions and pre-existing local and regional challenges, such as ruralcrisis. It argues that even in the context of cooperative modes of governance, mayors navigate variouschallenges. In terms of framing, this article shows how mayors in this multilevel context commonlyframed municipal involvement in asylum governance as a duty rather than as a burden or benefittotheir localities. It argues that this framing reflects a local‘politics of consensus’rather than‘localpragmatism’