There are many good reasons to dwell a little longer on current developments in Dutch and Flemish local government and to examine what both countries can learn from each other. Despite all the differences, Flemish and Dutch municipalities have more in common than with local government in France, the United Kingdom, German Länder or Scandinavian countries. Different words are used on both sides of the border, but the duties and powers of local officials are largely the same. It is therefore a good reason to subject the local government on either side of the border to a first comparison, as a prelude to the contributions in this special issue. After an initial interpretation of the institutional and administrative differences and agreements, the editors of this special issue discuss a number of current discussions about the role and position of the municipal council in Flanders and the Netherlands. They conclude with a brief introduction to the two contributions to this special issue.

This article compares the mayoralties of the Netherlands and Flanders, with a particular focus on the changes since 2010. The results show that the mayors of these two historically and culturally connected Low Countries form particularly homogeneous groups of people. This has not changed much over the last few years. The role and function of mayors in both Flanders and the Netherlands, however, have gradually changed substantially. In particular, both mayors’ responsibilities in the field of safety and security have increased. At the same time, the two mayoralties show considerable differences. The Flemish mayor has long been and still is a far more political figure than the Dutch mayor is. The Dutch mayoral office, however, is politicising, which has resulted in more debate about its role in local government than in Flanders. The comparison shows how the local political culture can strongly influence how public offices take shape.

Nowadays, municipalities form strategies and interact with the challenges and opportunities offered by the context in which they operate. From now on, Flemish municipalities are even obliged by the municipal decree to draw up a multiannual strategic plan (albeit in a transitory phase for the current legislature). That plan must formulate a coordinating strategy for the municipality and must contain guidelines for policy. In our contribution we want to examine on the one hand the particular meaning of this strategic plan for local governments. Which contents are given to these plans? How did these plans came about? What is the further course of these plans? What is the possible infl uence of local finances? Etc. On the other hand, we also want to take a broader look: how do we place the strategic plan in the light of the challenge of broader strategy formulation and decision-making which plays a vital role in contemporary local government?
Starting from a case study in the city of Kortrijk that incorporates both research perspectives, we consecutively conduct an exploring study into this young practice of strategic planning in all Flemish municipalities. Thereby we use in both cases opinion research by interviewing/surveying some key actors (politicians and/or civil servants). They help us to (re-)construct a provisional picture of the contents, the lay out and the future possibilities of strategic plans in contemporary local government.

The 2006 local elections in Belgium were the first one organised after the transfer of the local authorities competences from the federal to the regional level. This means by consequence that the different regions have as well the competence in designing the institutional framework of local government as the competence of changing electoral rules. The same elections were also the first ones after drastic reforms in the national political landscape (eg., the democratic Flemish nationalist party split in different groups, nearly all the parties changed their name and particularly in the Flemish part of the country, different kinds of alliances between parties emerged).
All over the country, the Christian democrats made progress and the ecologists suffered a declining trend. For the other parties, results depend from one region to another.
In the Flemish part of the country, the socialists and the extreme right wing joined the Christian democrats as winners of the elections. The other parties lost votes. This was particularly the case for the liberals and ecologists (the winners of the 2000 local elections). Liberals are however the winners in the Walloon part of the country, together with again the Christian democrats. In this region, socialists and ecologists were set back. In the Brussels region, we noticed progress for socialists and Christian democrats and declining figures for liberals and ecologists.
Analyses of political competition, number of groups in local councils and single party majorities point out that the fragmentation of local politics is not growing. The local political landscape seems to be more stable in the Walloons compared with the Flemish region.

The 2006 provincial elections in Belgium were the first organised after the transfer of the bulk of competences on local and provincial government from the federal to the regional level. This means that the different regions have both the competence to redesign the institutional framework on provincial government and to change the electoral rules. The government has exercised its competence: some institutional and electoral rules are now different in the two regions. These elections were also the first after drastic reforms in the national political landscape (e.g., the democratic Flemish nationalist party split in different groups, nearly all the parties changed their name and different kinds of cartels and alliances between parties emerged, especially in the Flemish part of the country).
All over the country, the Christian democrats and the extreme right parties were the winners of the elections, while the ecologists suffered from a declining trend. For the other parties, results differ according to region. In the Flemish part of the country, the socialists joined the Christian democrats as winners, where in the Walloon provinces they lost votes. The Liberals however noticed declining vote shares in the Flemish provinces, while winning in the Walloon part of the country.
Because of the electoral design the evolution of the provincial political landscape offers an interesting electoral barometer of the upcoming federal elections. Provincial elections do not only ‘predict’ the political future of other levels however, they are path dependent in their own right as well. Historical, institutional, political and electoral forces all codetermine the actual outlook of current provincial events. The analysis for 2006 has once again confirmed this.

With the local elections in 2006, new organisational schemes have been applied by the Flemish government to the 308 municipalities. These schemes included institutional reform aimed to change the outset of local government. In this article we studied the influence of these reforms in practice. Are they actually carriers of change? We thereby focused on the direct aspects linked to these reforms. While many instruments of reform had indirect intended effects, acceptance and action among key decision-makers (both voters and local governors to the extent of their discretion) to use them directly becomes crucial. Our analysis has shown that, with some exceptions, direct autonomous space for action was only limitedly used, hence reducing the chances for indirect change. While it is still too early to fully assess the foreseen indirect effects, in our opinion it is crucial to understand the nature of these local reforms within the central (Flemish) bargaining arena. The latter seems to have transformed the new schemes of local governmental organisation to the path-dependent art of the political feasible.

Although the 2006 local elections can hardly be described as ‘historical’, there is sufficient evidence to distinguish remarkable characteristics associated with this elections. For the first time in decades, turnout has been growing. This evolution can be explained by several factors. This article emphasizes besides the impact of changes in the electoral rules, transformations in demographic structure of the population and the stake of the elections the importance of the media campaign surrounding the elections. However, in spite of this (national) campaigns, there are more than enough indications that local politics keeps its local ‘nature’. Secondly, the 2006 elections were the first ones organised after the transfer of the responsibility for municipality legislation from the federal state to the regions. This means that each region designed its own local government architecture and electoral rules. Yet, in practice, the consequences of this transformations seem to be very limited. Thirdly, and particular in the Flemish region, ‘strong mayors’ arose from the ballot stations (with the Antwerp mayor as the most spectacular case). The consequences of this trend will in the future be the issue of a new debate concerning the relations between council, board of alderman and mayor.

It is often suggested that the nationalization of local elections has increased. As a result, a hypothesis could be that the mutual differences between policy programs of local divisions of the same national party decrease. In this contribution, we focus on the local election of October 8th 2006 in order to analyse these mutual differences. The aim of this contribution is to measure the homogeneity or heterogeneity of the policy positions of the local divisions of national political parties, on a range of substantive issues on which they have the freedom to differ. Therefore, we compare the opinions of local party agents within the different party families. We use the results of a survey among the representatives of the local departments of the different political parties in the run-up to the local elections. Our research shows that, regarding to the selected questions, in general the local divisions speak with one voice. Our analysis does not indicate that there is a large mixture of visions between divisions of the same national party. Besides, this analysis shows that in general, the size of the municipality can seldom be used in indicating the relative disagreement within political families. This level of agreement is the largest within the green party and the smallest within the liberal family. Those are also the two parties of which the local agents say that the influence of supra-local party levels is small, compared to representatives of other political families.

An important element in the debate on the hollowed State is the extent to which the subsidiary idea caused a decrease in dominance of the central State and lead to a multifaceted process of decentralisation. A case in point is the recent regionalisation of the competency to organise local government in Belgium. Based on Page and Goldsmith’s three dimensions in intergovernmental relations between central and local government (functions, discretion and access), we test the discourse of the reform of the local government in Flanders to its practice. It is argued that the principles of a subsidiary founded municipal autonomy, a growing fiscal and functional discretion and a personal disentanglement of local and central decision-makers was inspired by northern European models of government relations. These, however, are only partially being confirmed by the praxis of the reforms, as the main principles of the existing southern European models persist.