Samenvatting

While the international community tries to picture what the future of Belgium as a country will be, the different regions (Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels) deal with issues of territorial governance like amalgamations, the future of provinces, city-regions and intergovernmental collaboration. The article maps these issues, but also which facts, interests and arguments are brought to the table, and to what extent policy agendas in the three regions are similar or not. In Wallonia and Flanders, the existence of the provincial tier is questioned and intermunicipal collaboration should become more important. Amalgamation of municipalities is discussed openly in Flanders - with little success so far, while such a debate is absent in Wallonia. The authors zoom in on the debate in Flanders, showing how rich the landscape of intergovernmental and public-private collaboration is, which variations exist, how each policy sector creates and protects its ‘own’ regional turf, how political debate on ‘cleaning up the mess of regional organisations’ requires nuancing, and how the Belgian political culture shapes that sectoral regional landscape. The authors build on two regional mappings, combining descriptive information with input from the interactive processes with different stakeholders on issues of efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability.