The Institutionalisation of Evaluation in Europe

Abstract

In order to have an accurate understanding of the level and way of institutionalisation of policy evaluation in Belgium, it is essential to highlight some key tenets of its politico-administrative setting: the federal structure, multiple party coalition governments and partitocracy. Since 1993, Belgium is officially a federal state. Consecutive constitutional reforms have transferred major competences from the national (coined 'federal') level to the regional level. The distribution of competences on the regional level is mainly organised along two broad axes. The first axis concerns linguistics and culture. A Flemish-, French-and German-speaking Community are each in charge of person-related matters (examples: education, culture, youth). The second axis is designed to accommodate the diversity in socioeconomic interests in the country and has constituted the basis for the creation of three territorial regions: the Flemish Region, the Walloon Region and the Brussels-Capital Region. The regions are in charge of territorial matters (examples: environment, agriculture), and legislation with regard to municipalities and provinces. Despite the devolution in competences to regions and communities, the federal level in Belgium is still competent for traditionally core tasks of a state including internal security, foreign affairs, defence, justice and finance. Moreover, in several domains, competences are scattered over the federal and regional level (examples: labour market, health care and social security). All government levels do have their own government; parliament and administration, with the exception of the Flemish region and community which have merged their institutions (Pattyn and Brans 2015). 1 This chapter is to large extent based on the conference paper entitled 'Once Laggard, Always Laggard? A multi-level analysis of the state of evaluation institutionalisation in Belgium', that the authors presented at the 2016 European Evaluation Society conference in Maastricht. For this conference paper, we launched a questionnaire that was modelled along the survey used in (Jacob et al., 2015). We owe special thanks to Steve Jacob for sharing this questionnaire; and we are most grateful to the eleven respondents that provided us with valuable input on the state of evaluation institutionalisation in Belgium. The insights collected via this survey have been integrated in this chapter.