From Incremental to Copernican Reform?: Changes to the Position and Role of Senior Civil Servants in the Belgian Federal Administration

Abstract

In contrast with their colleagues in several other countries, senior civil servants in Belgium have never really fitted into the picture of a socially and politically distinctive elite (Brans and Hondeghem 1999). Even more striking, however, is the observation that the position and policy role of the senior civil service in the 1990s appears to have changed little in three decades. Moreover the diagnosis of the problems of Belgian administration and the remedies put forward in the 1960s seem to have persisted into the 1990s. So has there been no change at all? From the 1960s to the 1990s we have in fact witnessed some major changes in the broader social and political environment in which the public service operates, as well as modernisation efforts within the public service. It took until the beginning of the 21st century, however, for a major reform programme to materialise. What was labelled a ‘Copernican reform’ would indeed radically impact upon the status and role of senior officials. This chapter first compares the role of senior civil servants over a period of three decades. It then points out pressures for change in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the obstacles that seemed to have delayed reform, or encumbered attempts to alter the position of senior civil servants. The article ends with an overview and assessment of the recent Copernicus reform. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.