National coordination of EU policy in Belgium: from de iure competitive to de facto cooperative under European pressure.

This paper shows how Belgian actors involved in European policies set up coordination mechanisms taking into account the constraints of the Belgian constitution and of the EU basic Treaty. To this end, it first presents the relevant features of the domestic and European institutional environments and discusses how these interact with each other. This provides the necessary context to understand the development and functioning of the Belgian coordination and implementation mechanisms. The paper specifically looks the impact of recent developments such as preparation for the increasingly more powerful European Council, the participation in European Semester procedures and in new areas such as climate and digital policies, and the impact of the pandemic. The paper shows that the institutional verflechtung of the regional, the federal and the European level pushed domestic administrative and political behavior in the direction of more cooperation whenever European policies were concerned and specifically in those areas where Belgian subnational entities and the European level are both involved. At the same time, domestic politicization and increasingly diverging political agendas put pressure on the effectiveness of coordination mechanisms