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Resource competition is assumed to encourage commercial behaviour by publically funded non-profit organizations (NPOs). However, this widespread assumption falls short as empirical findings remain ...

Despite widespread concerns about nonprofit organizations becoming “business-like” by hybridizing toward the market sphere, systematic knowledge about the extent and coherency to which this phenomenon finds traction beyond the liberal welfare context remains largely absent to date. Based on survey data ( N = 496), this study addresses this lacuna for the region of Flanders (Belgium), an emblematic case of a post-corporatist welfare state. We find that (a) business practices are on the rise yet not prominently present, and (b) the theorized conceptual coherence of this phenomenon corresponds with a more fragmented empirical reality. This raises the question to what extent the conception of nonprofit hybridization toward the market sphere as a “monolithic threat” to the distinctiveness of the nonprofit sphere is an empirical reality in a post-corporatist welfare context.

Neo-corporatist relations consist of a stabilized institutional exchange between government, civil society and other social spheres. Current research suggests a destabilization of this relationship...

A growing body of literature discusses the (dis)advantages of nonprofit organizations becoming commercial by engaging in the sale of organizational services and products. However, when explaining this phenomenon, scholars tend to focus on resource uncertainty, thereby disregarding the organizational ability to commercialize. Complementing resource dependency theory with insights from contingency theory, this study presents arguments drawn from a comparative case study of six sociocultural nonprofits in Belgium. We find that, when resource uncertainty is similar, organizational differences in terms of commercial income can be explained by differences in (a) organizational origins, (b) professional capacity and, (c) type of tasks. We conclude that organizational characteristics can either enable or disable the ability of nonprofits to commercialize and consequently their ability to self-sustain in an increasing challenging resource environment.

This chapter explores the potential of functional administrative reforms as a basis for city-regional governance. An analysis of the case of Flanders, a strong regional government which is currently developing new territorial policy approaches, is presented. We discuss the recent administrative reform that has led to the creation of so-called mobility regions and raise the question to what extent this reform breaks with the existing politico-administrative constellation in Flanders. Our findings suggest that the design of the mobility regions contains elements that could be described as critical junctures in the Flemish institutional history. Nevertheless, the reform programme also does not question some of the core issues of the current politico-administrative system, which may strongly impact the institutional outcomes of this new governance arrangement.

In spite of the belief instilled by the New Public Management reforms that nonprofit organizations (NPOs) can benefit from more management, more measurement and more market practices, systematic knowledge on the organizational effects of NPOs incorporating business practices in their day-to-day functioning remains absent to date. This research note addresses this limitation by reviewing 49 research articles. The focus lies on the redefinition of nonprofits' mission and income streams, changing governance arrangements and shifting management practices. We find that, despite numerous detrimental effects cited in the literature, (a) generating commercial income can contribute to the financial stability of NPOs, and (b) hybridization towards the market domain can strengthen the organizational legitimacy of NPOs, suggesting that imitating for-profit enterprises might contribute to nonprofit functioning in perception, rather than in practice.

In this article, we use the concept of metagovernance to explore how local service delivery networks involving public and private partners are shaped and managed by different governments involved. We address the following questions: What is the governance mix in cases of centrally designed local networks, with different public authorities involved in the network and focused on coordinated service delivery? How does that governance mix match the concept of metagovernance as we know it? What does this complexity of relationships and governing styles tell us about the self-governing capacity of local service delivery networks? We bring in the case of the local job centers in Flanders to deal with these questions empirically. We demonstrate the governance instrument mix used by the metagovernors, how dominant one public actor actually is in the network, and the effect thereof on the network dynamics. We also conclude that we need to rethink the concept of metagovernance when analyzing local multilevel networks.

How should we adapt the concept of Business – IT alignment to grasp the complexity of public organizations? To answer this question, we theorize that understanding the variation in alignment in public organizations, implies that we take into account the political and institutional context, and consider the interaction between IT and the organization as a continuous process on different levels. Those amendments on the alignment literature are integrated in an interpretive alignment approach. Case study results illustrate the value of this approach.

This article assesses and explains the performance of the Belgian network of the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (CBE), representing the mandated “network administrative organization form” (Kenis and Provan, 2009). We address the following questions: To what degree is the mandated network able to reduce the complexity that arises from the fragmented nature of public service delivery? Does the hierarchical nature of the mandate help to obtain the desired production, process, and regime performance? What is the impact of the hybrid nature of the arrangement on the performance? Could this analysis help us to improve the performance assessment of types of networks? To cope with these questions, we apply the framework of Voets et al. (2010) to the case of the CBE. Although partly successful and effective, the network did not generate the desired outputs. Explanations for the lack of performance are found in the complex process of interacting network dimensions.

Recent evolutions in Western societies have sparked renewed debate on the state of political representation. This article contributes to the debate by applying a multifaceted typology developed by Andeweg and Thomassen (2005) to study political representation in Belgian local governance. The article empirically outlines the notions of 856 local councillors on political representation at the attitudinal and behavioural level. Furthermore, it searches to explain variation in the latter according to councillors’ political and personal profile, their contact pattern, and the local government context. The article paints a balanced picture. The largest group of councillors prefer an all-round style, paying equal importance to authorization, accountability, delegation and responsiveness as basic styles or modes of political representation. Still we perceive a clear shift from councillors’ attitudes, in which delegation takes the upper hand, to their acclaimed behaviour, which becomes more entrepreneurial as it is often hypothesized. Meanwhile, councillors’ personal profile and contact pattern seem the most important determinants of political representation.

This paper presents a contextualised analysis of what might be called the city-regional debate. The debate is unfolded in terms of four types of city-regional issues, eight common strategies to tackle the latter and the use thereof in Flanders. It is concluded that the way in which city-regional issues are dealt with in Flanders can be explained by its regime, consisting of an administrative, political and cultural dimension, in terms of a centralistic policy style combined with a weak institutional position of local governments, by a ‘localisation’ of regional politics and policies, both dominated by an anti-urban bias.

This article discusses the issue of democratic quality of area-based policy networks, with particular attention to the complex settings of network relations and to the changes in local regimes. It is argued that present associative and deliberative frameworks of democratic theory are useful but inadequate to enable proper assessments of multilevel and multiactor policy arrangements. The article therefore combines both frameworks with a contextualized and dynamic perspective and supports this position with a case analysis of a spatial planning network in Ghent, Belgium. It finds that in Flanders, local representative democracywas dominated by corporatism and party political arrangements, and emergent networks for spatial planning are replacing old corporatist arrangements in a new institutional framework for local representative democracy. The article concludes that analyzing area-based networks without analyzing changes in representative democracy in the same area can easily lead to biased conclusions.

Nowadays, cities formulate long-term strategies to address the challenges and opportunities they face. Numerous strategic plans or planning instruments are developed for this purpose. In this article, we would like to examine the role, impact and relevance of these types of plans in decision-making processes concerning urban development projects (UDPs) in the Flemish Region of Belgium. To what extent do strategic plans succeed in capturing and steering the complexity of spatial interventions in contemporary urban contexts? We argue that a complexity-acknowledging perspective provides a more realistic and adequate view here by seeing strategic plans as only one among many elements in the set of tangled inter-and intrastrategic processes which together determine UDPs. A comparative and qualitative case study was carried out in the city of Kortrijk. The decision-making of three UDPs was studied thoroughly. Interviewing key actors and analysing policy documents helped us to (re) construct the complex decision-making processes and to stipulate the meaning of all involved formal plans and planning tools.

Under the surface of great unity, Belgium suffered from three cleavages that have divided the small nation. This article discusses the three cleavages that have influenced and affected the political make-up of Belgian. The first two have an indirect effect on subnational democracy as they are an expression of the structural relationship between the state, civil society, and the market. The third cleavage has a more direct bearing on democracy beyond the nation-state. The first cleavage is the rise of liberals opposing rural Catholic domination of society. A logic of subsidiarity was formed which developed a system of pillarization (verzuiling) which segmented society. The second cleavage is economic, as the mass labour force stood against a capitalist regime. With the development of the labour movement and the spread of voting rights, capitalism became more state-regulated. This led to corporatism where private organizations were given privileged status and often monopolized substantial aspects of public goods and service delivery. The last cleavage is the conflicts between two linguistic communities. This conflict affected the nature of the subnational democracy of Belgium. The combined effects of the three cleavages: pillarization, corporatism, and regionalization, made Belgium local governments and local leaders amongst the weakest in Europe. While tendencies of divergence are prevalent in the Belgian context, convergence is still a possibility: the regions integrated Belgian heritage into their political systems. The most crucial is the strong political localism which led to a complex intergovernmental and party-political lobbying and to blurred responsibilities which hollow out local democracy. In general, local democracy has been the victim of such systematic features.

This chapter explores how network management is innovative from an intergovernmental perspective. The following questions are dealt with: who are the actual network managers; what management roles can be identified and how do they help create innovative capacity for intergovernmental problem-solving? These questions are answered through the use of a semi-inductive approach. First, network management is mapped using the framework developed by Kickert, Klijn and Koppenjan, and some additional elements are suggested for inclusion. Secondly, a role typology is developed and it is shown how the mix of these roles creates new intergovernmental capacity. The empirical evidence is drawn from case study data on two Flemish intergovernmental networks.

Collaborative approaches to local economic development have developed in a number of European countries and other advanced economies (Giguere, in this volume). These take economic development from within public bureaucracies and relocate it to new organisational forms based on co-production between government and business, sometimes with the additional involvement of civil society associations and citizens. The resulting structures include quasi-autonomous public agencies, public–private partnership companies, multi-organisational boards and community-based organisations for neighbourhood regeneration, often operating in a multi-level environment of overlapping jurisdictions (Ansell, 2000; Heinelt and Kubler, 2005; Sullivan and Skelcher, 2002). The rationale for taking economic development out of the public bureaucracy is that it enables greater flexibility in approach because of the reduction of direct political oversight, and enhances policy design and implementation because of the engagement of non-state actors (Considine, in this volume).

This article deals with the question of how to assess policy network performance. We propose three dimensions of policy network performance (production, process, and regime) that are derived from both performance and network literature. Each of these dimensions can be linked to the costs of policy networks. The framework goes beyond the one-dimensional new public management conceptualization of performance that focuses on efficiency and effectiveness. A policy network assessment needs to take into account other public principles such as democratic quality and capacity building

In this article, the complex set of driving factors and mechanisms that explain the evolution of territorial governance in Flanders in economic and spatial policy are discussed. A mix of both exogenous and endogenous trends has led to an increased focus on the sub-regional arena and to an administrative and political jungle, creating opportunities for “smart” local actors. The result is a broadened, strengthened, more professional “political localism”—in part due to innovation in planning—that may potentially favour innovation at the local level, on a background of relatively stable and unaltered political routines at the central level.

De Rynck Filip. II. La régionalisation des lois communale et provinciale : état de la question en Flandre. In: Annuaire des collectivités locales. Tome 22, 2002. L'organisation territoriale de la France, demain. pp. 271-277.