Strategic Policy Planning at the Local Level: A Flemish Performance Starring Regional Government

Abstract

This chapter illustrates how intergovernmental fusion challenges local government reform in Flanders. In this northern part of Belgium, regional and local governments are closely interwoven. For decades, this fusion has put the Flemish government in a leading role as far as local strategic policy planning is concerned. Since the 1990s, field administrations have steered their local counterparts to very divergent planning practices as a prerequisite for granting state money to various local policy branches. But this sectorial subsidisation caused so-called planning burden for local governments that hindered them from strategically planning in a holistic manner. The Flemish government recently endeavoured to coordinate its intergovernmental steering practice in ten policy fields. Drawing upon empirical data acquired by document analyses and interviews in these fields, this chapter aims at finding out if the regional field administrations have now streamlined and also limited their top-down steering to support the local reform towards holistic planning. At first sight, our analysis pointed to goodwill on their part to support the reform. However, a closer look revealed that strong path dependency towards their own historic-institutional logic clearly ruled in case of conflict. If possible, field administrations prefer to hang on to their way of steering and thus keep on playing a starring role in local strategic planning.