Contrasting administrative capacities as forms of neoliberalism in the two main regions of Belgium, Flandre et en Wallonie

For several decades, Belgium has been engaged in a twofold process of institutional transformation, combining federalization and Europeanization. The transfer of competencies to the regions and communities requires them to develop new political and administrative governance mechanisms that may or may not support European projects. This chapter analyzes two distinct moments of institutional reform: the takeover of science policy by the two large communities (in 1989) and the organization of the transfer of family allowance policy (2014). In the first case, the aim is to include scientific policies in the dynamics of the knowledge-based Europe in support of the extension of the intellectual property market; in the second, to restructure a social policy in order to (re)define the modalities specific to the welfare state, despite the pressure of budgetary austerity principles. In both cases, Flanders and Wallonia show very different trajectories in the development of new policies and administrative arrangements. We propose to compare these developments in the two regions by asking how they do fit the expansion of "neoliberal" governmentality in one or both regions? One of the characteristics of a neoliberalization process would be an extension of market (or quasi-market) relations into parts of society or sectors of the state that were previously untouched by them. The creation of market structures is not a natural fact but a state fact, a recomposition of the state's modes of action (Bezes, 2009). In other words, the State itself reinvents its functioning and its technology of governement to support the expansion of the market logic (as in the case of intellectual property), that is, the production in a logic of competitive selection of decontextualized and mobile objects whose competitive qualities are made legible. In this context, it is then a question for the researchers of highlighting the rationality of government that is reflected in the bureaucratic power mechanisms (Foucault 2004) and underline how they favor the logic of the market to the whole of society and generalize an economic rationality to instruct and manage public action (Dardot and Laval, 2010). The analysis of the singular trajectories of neo-liberalization traced by these two federated entities when they seized new competencies highlights the transformation of the repertoires of public administration and public action in the sectors analyzed. The question that motivates us is therefore the following: how are the new policies put in place through the action of administrative vehicles in the process of formation and what are the knowledge networks mobilized to establish their political rationality? What are the interplays between the bureaucratic power mechanisms and the political orientations of the governments in the two regions for two policy sectors.