Public consultation and participation in Belgium: directly engaging citizens beyond the ballot box?

In this chapter we look into the growth of diverse types of public inquiries and public consultation arrangements in policy-making. These arrangements bring to the table individual members of the public who otherwise have no direct policy – advisory – role, given the predominance of neo-corporatist style advisory bodies in Belgium (Van Damme and Brans, 2013). In some of these new public consultation and participation forms, citizens are not at the end of the delivery process, but are actively engaged in framing policy problems, and selecting and evaluating policy solutions. The chapter explains what public consultation is, its links with policymaking and the political regimes. The chapter also provides a Framework for analysis. It is applied to the diverse experiences of participatory democracy in Belgium.