The State of Educational Research in Belgium

Our main point is that the consociational democracy that prevails in Belgium (Seiler, 1997) does not encourage knowledge use and circulation across the policy community. The main argument is that discretion and secrecy constitute fundamental requirements of a pillarised society. As Lijphart (1977, pp. 41–44) indicates, one of the main principles that enables such democracies to function peacefully is segmental autonomy (‘autonomie segmentaire’). In The Netherlands (which used to be a consociational democracy), one encounters the principle of ‘gedogen’, which is a virtually untranslatable Dutch term that means ‘looking the other way when you must’ (Van Der Hoek, 2000). According to this principle, once an agreement is reached regarding the distribution of resources among segments (pillars), each pillar ‘minds its own business’ so that all parties involved benefit from a relative autonomy. Segments then do not need or want to know what others are doing, nor why or how they are doing it. Neither do they want others to look into their affairs. The mot d’ordre is non-involvement in neighbours’ affairs. Discretion is the price of peace in a consociational democracy.

In this context, policy assessment does not expand and, more generally, knowledge about the system and its components is not wanted. This explains why, as many experts have observed (Varone & de Visscher, 2001; Varone & Jacob, 2004), evaluation policy is rather underdeveloped in Belgium. The pillars are vertical and autonomous, while knowledge and expertise tend to see the system horizontally and give rise to instability. Let us also underline that in pillarised societies, no central State is powerful enough to impose itself as a legitimate evaluator of the system and its components: when pillars are strong — as has been the case in Belgium — , the State is usually weak (De Munck, 2002).

Essentially, decision-making in a pillarised society is based on compromises (Dumont & Delgrange, 2008). This has implications for the use of knowledge in the decision-making process which cannot be guided by expertise and evidence, as its primary orientation is the need to reach a compromise. Expertise and knowledge come second, if at all. Compromise-based policy-making prevails over knowledge-based policy-making. This stems from the very nature of the Belgian consociational arrangement. It also explains why there has never really been any clear and strong political discourse (let alone will) to promote evidence-based where the political will to promote State knowledge and expertise (van Zanten, 2006) has existed for a long time.

The tension between knowledge and policy in a consociation is most evident when it involves knowledge (or instruments) that would inform actors about their performance. Until recently, Belgium had never held any national examinations (comparable to the French baccalaureate for example) in the education sector. For a long time, providing users or collective actors with knowledge that would enable them to compare students, schools or networks was seen as disrupting the peace, as it would undermine the basis of the consociational pact, according to which differences between schools or school providers are based strictly on denomination.

In the same vein, Belgium has not usually embraced practices such as benchmarking. Benchmarking means looking at what others do, possibly measuring how well they do it, identifying those who do it best, and subsequently following their example. Peace in the Belgian education sector requires that each institutional actor mind its own business.

This structure is mirrored in the way research is organized and conducted in the field of education in Belgium. Thus, as universities are also pillarised, all researchers and academics can be said to belong to a given pillar, although they may not think that this does or should interfere with their work. However, one cannot help but notice that most of the educational research is mono- and intra-pillar. It is mono-pillar in that it looks at only one network, and intra-pillar in that the researchers usually belong to the pillar they are investigating.

Most researchers in the field have experienced or witnessed the many obstacles one faces when trying to design research that seeks to look across different school networks belonging to different pillars. Research questions exploring differences between networks (in terms of performance, teaching methods or other issues) are politically difficult to investigate: access to the field will probably be denied or prove difficult, whilst funding is likely to be subject to several conditions. One condition that is sometimes imposed is that the research must be inter-university (comprised of universities belonging to different pillars). Another could be the setting up of an accompaniment committee made up of representatives from different pillars and to which the researchers would have to report regularly. These conditions constitute forms of soft surveillance. They also tell us something about the relationship between research and policy in Belgium, namely, that knowledge is very ‘sensitive’ to ‘policy-makers’ (the elites of the different pillars).

However, this does not mean that there is a knowledge vacuum in Belgium. While there are obviously things that institutional actors do not want to know and issues for which knowledge is not wanted, other types of knowledge are promoted, some of which receive funding. In the education sector, pedagogical research probably receives more funding than any other research field. Its approach is often normative and uncritical, yet highly consensual. In addition, pedagogical research does not proceed primarily through investigation: it often focuses less on how things actually work, and more on how they should work. Hence, it does not threaten consociational arrangements. Research in the field receives funding, and certain recent decrees have formulated a number of pedagogical assertions - which prompt the question as to who wrote them.

These conditions were slow to change in the 1990s, but evolved more rapidly as from 2000. The changes included an expansion in the data-gathering capacities and initiatives of several actors (the government, the administration, the ‘networks’, and unions) and the creation of numerous inter-pillar and inter-network committees and groups (the Conseil de l’éducation et de la formation, the Commission de Pilotage and various other ad hoc committees). For Belgium, these constituted major changes: there is now greater interest in learning more about the system, and inter-network governance is growing. To understand how these changes occurred, one must examine changes in Belgian society and in the international community.

Within Belgium

Today, notwithstanding the pillars’ influence, their internal integration — at one time very tight — has weakened. The decrease in integration has occurred at two levels: (i) membership and (ii) vertical integration. Membership in pillarised organisations is now less integrated than ever before. By this, we mean that more individuals are crossing pillar boundaries during their lives. For example, they may be affiliated with the union of one pillar, yet vote for a party associated with a different pillar; or they might transfer from a Catholic school to a public school, etc. In the education sector, while most children stay in a given pillar throughout their education, today more than ever they are crossing pillars. When it comes to individual choices, there has been a shift — though limited — from pillarisation to privatisation.

At the same time, inter-organisational relations within pillars have become less integrated. By this we mean that the sense of cohesion or commonality once shared by leaders from different organisations (unions, schools, political parties, etc.) within a given pillar has declined. Professionalisation has contributed to this process. Consequently, interaction among organisations occurs less frequently and open disagreement sometimes arises. This may be viewed as a slow process of dissociation. Each leader gains a degree of autonomy and is no longer closely bound to the pillar. This has probably made it easier for them to improve the sectoral dialogue with their counterparts in other pillars or countries.

Comparative Knowledge and Transnational Discourses

We argue that these changes have also occurred because of forces that are external to the sector. They came about through the sheer number of influences and economic discourses rather than through explicit policy ideas. Instruments of international comparison (such as PISA and previous OECD and IEA studies) played an important role in these changes. Comparisons generate and publicise knowledge about various education systems and their respective performances. In Belgium, such comparisons played a brokering role, in that they prompted elites from the various networks to get together for one simple reason: they now had something in common; and that was a problem. Actually, they had several problems in common. According to OECD (1994), Belgium was spending too much on policy, evidence-based practices or policy evaluation. By contrast, this type of discourse has been much stronger in Anglo-Saxon countries, as well as in France education, in view of the results it obtained for its financial outlay. PISA repeatedly emphasised that the education sector in Belgium was both inefficient (low mean) and highly inequitable (high variance). This put pressure on policy makers and network representatives, forcing them to improve joint regulation. Elites now had to think about managing the system more effectively and collectively across networks and pillars.

At the same time, a new discourse on education and its role slowly penetrated the policy community. The new dominant discourse on education and training emphasised their strategic dimension for national economic prosperity. It changed the outlook of the community. In consociations, education is viewed, primarily, as a vehicle for values and culture. However, the new discourse now claimed it was a vehicle for achievement and prosperity:

“…without exception, national governments of all political persuasions have declared that it is the quality of their education and training systems which will decisively shape the international division of labour and national prosperity. Therefore, the diminished power of nation states to control economic competition has forced them to compete in what we call the global knowledge wars” (Brown & Lauder, 1997, p. 174).

Obviously, the trend towards greater accountability also challenges the consociational requirement for discretion. As accountability is presented in European forums, information on comparisons between nations, regions, organisations or individuals seems increasingly to make its way into the dominant discourse at the international level (the same holds true of international comparisons provided by intergovernmental or other international agencies). Such knowledge reflects concern with performance in a global world: ‘How well do we do compare to others?’ From a consociational standpoint, this questions the stability of the foundations of a pillarised society (i.e. its values and identities, discretion and autonomy). Can globalisation be domesticated without fundamentally altering such foundations?

The comparative knowledge and transnational discourses accompanying globalisation forced elites from different pillars to jointly consider reforming the system. This started a trend: elites from separate pillars would increasingly act jointly in their thinking, information gathering, policy making and system management (i.e. they were turning it into a single system instead of an entity composed of different systems). As consociations are composed of societies-in-a society and systems-in-a-system, creating an integrated system is a major challenge that requires the re-invention of policy-making in Belgium.

The elites entered into dialogue in the 1990s, attempting to reach agreement on common rules in a variety of educational areas: examinations, curricula, enrolment, student expulsions, hiring of staff, inspection, and so on. These educational policies, which had for a long time been left to the networks, were now increasingly negotiated among pillars/networks. In fact, several changes occurred in the 1990s.

The number of inter-network committees and other working groups expanded. Members of these groups and committees were often torn between the need to work together and the long-standing practice of preserving the autonomy of one’s own pillar.Thus, the roles played by meetings of these groups and their positions vis-à-vis the acquisition of knowledge were not always clear. The primary reason why institutionalised actors participated in the meetings was to ensure that none of the decisions would weaken or potentially threaten their autonomy. However, the meetings also served as forums where elites and agents from different pillars would meet and talk. In this sense, they slowly developed a degree of cohesion, formulating common problems and sharing cognitive references. While consociational democracies are often described as ‘societies-in-a-society’ (Vanderstraeten, 2002) or systems-in-a-system, it is possible that recent changes will lead to the creation of a more integrated system.

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*For more details, see : Mangez, E. (2010). Global Knowledge‐based Policy in Fragmented Societies: the case of curriculum reform in French‐speaking Belgium. European Journal of Education, 45(1), 60-73.