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.

In this concluding article of the special issue on web 2.0 we critically discuss several of the effects of this trend. Is it always a good idea to let citizens participate in policy making through social media? Will Open Data only lead to positive effects? And will the co-creation possibilities of web 2.0 really dramatically alter the ways in which bureaucracies function, as its advocates believe? We also draw up an agenda for future research on the governmental effects of web 2.0.

There are many different ways in which employees may choose to address unequal treatment at work. They may do so themselves, in an informal or formal manner on the work floor. They may also, at some stage in the dispute, decide to involve specialized advisers such as legal advisers, anti-discrimination officers, health and safety executives and labour unions. It is generally assumed that consulting such specialized advisers will help the employee to address unequal treatment more successfully. In this paper, the effectiveness of the interorganizational field of specialized advisers is analyzed on the basis of an elaborate study among different types of respondents. The main finding is that fear of retaliation plays a crucial role in seeking and receiving specialized advice and that the existing interorganizational field broadly fails to cope with this fear. To resolve this issue, the field needs an improved governance structure with better co-ordination between different types of advisers.