Policy analysis instruction in Belgium

Abstract

Both academic and applied policy analysis are relatively young disciplines that have found their way into academic curricula of universities only towards the end of the previous century. This is surprising given that policy analytical models were disseminated in Belgium already in the late 1960s, as was the case in the Netherlands. While this sparked the policy analysis movement in the Dutch government and academia, policy analysis instruction in Belgium remained subsequently underdeveloped, and policy analytical knowledge was taught in a fragmented fashion. The concept of the policy cycle was for instance taught under general courses on political science, or as a section in a course on public administration. Other policy analytical knowledge appeared under public management courses, or substantive policy courses such as social policy, socio-economic policy, and urban planning. On the basis of document analysis (including the regional accreditation reports), the chapter seeks to explain the development of policy analysis instruction from a fragmented into a more autonomous discipline. Next to this, the chapter analyses two more questions: whether official professional training curricula have also come to embrace policy analytical knowledge, and whether divergences in policy analysis instruction across the language border reflect different practices in government

Beyond Linguistic Peripheral Elites: The Provincial Imbalance of Cabinet Ministers in Belgium

“…Not all ministers in the federal cabinet are equal, and there is in fact a rigid hierarchy at place (Brans et al 2017). At the top of the cabinet, one finds the prime minister, followed by the deputy prime ministers (senior ministers), the ministers, and finally the state secretaries (junior ministers).…”

Bureaucratic policy work and analytical capacities in central administrations in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain: The results of a comparative survey

“…Although there is a well-institutionalised stream of research focused on policy work since the classic work of Meltsner (1975), this has not been symmetrically developed in terms of empirical evidence from a comparative perspective. In fact, outside the US, only a few national cases have undergone empirical scrutiny, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world – Canada (Howlett et al, 2017; Wellstead et al, 2009, 2011), the UK (Page and Jenkins, 2005), New Zealand (Boston et al, 1996) and Australia (Head et al, 2014) – with several European cases, such as Germany (Fleischer, 2009), Belgium (Aubin and Brans, 2020; Brans and Aubin, 2017; Fobé, 2021) and the Czech Republic (Nekola and Kohoutek, 2016; Veselý et al, 2014); and remarkably also Brazil (Filgueiras et al, 2020; Koga et al, 2022) and the Philippines (Saguin et al, 2018). This kind of focus has not been adopted for analysing Southern European countries, which could also be a very interesting case for comparison.…”

Government research institutes in the Italian policy advisory system

“…In these countries, the civil service is traditionally politicised at the top (Peters, 2008), and the monopoly of advice is in the hands of the ministerial cabinets, which are politically appointed. Nonetheless, this monopoly seems threatened by new developments in public administration, thanks to a rebalance of influence between the cabinets and the administration in favour of the latter (Brans and Aubin, 2017: 58; Gouglas et al, 2017; Meert et al, 2019) to the changing role of traditional advisory bodies (Fobé et al, 2013; Pattyn et al, 2019). In other words, the literature on the Napoleonic PAS suggests that the system is increasingly diversified inside government, thus requiring further investigation.…”