Diederik Vancoppenolle

Administrative reform in Belgium: maintenance or modernisation?

This article aims to analyse, classify and explain similarities and differences in administrative reform in four separate Belgian administrations along four internationally observed trends in administrative reform: organisation, personnel, strategy, and finance. Comparatively, Flanders can be classified as an early moderniser, followed by the federal government, which had been locked longer in a trajectory of maintenance. The French-speaking governments of the Walloon Region and French Community are late modernisers, and compared to both the Flemish and federal government their reform efforts are more fragmented and incremental. The main factors explaining variations in administrative reform in Belgium are differences in institutional continuity, policy entrepreneurship and policy diffusion, all three of which combined to support administrative reform efforts at the Flemish and, slightly less so, at the federal levels, and were markedly absent in the French-speaking governments. Aggregated indicators of differences in political culture do not convincingly explain differences in public sector reform, but the degree of partisan control over the administration, as a meso dimension of politico-administrative culture, impacts on the French-speaking governments resistance against certain types of organisational and human resources management reforms.

Policy-making in an era of agencification: An exploration of task divisions between politicians, core departments and public agencies

Abstract In many Western countries, alongside NPM-rhetoric, important tasks of public service delivery have been devolved to autonomous single purpose agencies. This was also the case in Flanders (Belgium). This reform rhetoric also has a clear vision on how tasks in the policy cycle are to be distributed between actors: policy-making is a political prerogative, supported by core governmental departments, whereas executive agencies have policy implementation as their main task. This article addresses whether this ideal-typical model really exists, drawing on two case studies of policy initiatives in Flanders. Our observations confirm a policy-operations divide between politics and administration, but it needs refinement: ministers and their advisors make the strategic policy decisions, in which they are assisted by executive agencies. Ministerial departments are hardly involved in the policy-making process. Executive agencies are more than policy implementers alone, as they often have a large input in the operational stages of policy-making.

Failure in service delivery by public-private networks: The case of Flemish childcare

The involvement of private actors (non-profit and/or for-profit) in public service provision has a lot of consequences and implications not only for users and service providers, but also for government. This article explores the consequences for the relations within public-private service provision networks, by focusing on the governance regime of childcare in Flanders. Our case analysis clearly shows that public-private service provision networks may threaten the transparency of the service provision field for users, and challenge the role of the oversight authority, often requiring a two-level steering of the service provision field: a direct steering of individual service providers and the network and/or market steering of the whole service provision field (in a community or region). Governance regimes comprising service providers of different sectors may complicate this kind of network steering, as there seem to exist at least six relationships within such networks. Furthermore, we noticed that service providers may face conflicting (public) accountabilities.