Coupling mini-publics to collaborative governance: the case of the Education Reform in the Belgian French Speaking Community

Mini-publics are increasingly used as a way to cure the malaise of representative democracy (Newton & Geissel, 2012). Such mini-publics are small scale face-to-face deliberative forums gathering lay citizens to provide decision makers with recommendations on a particular topic. In order to maximize the potential of mini-publics, scholars have explored ways to incorporate these deliberative forums into the policy-making process (Gastil, Ryan, & Smith, 2017). Hitherto, they have, however, overlooked the shift from government to governance (Papadopoulos, 2012a). This new paradigm puts forward a more horizontal and cooperative form of the policy-making process in which various stakeholders are involved through a variety of cooperative schemes. Therein, mini-publics become one additional site of deliberation among others, implying that it interacts with and reports to a variety of new institutional actors. Very few studies have tried to understand how the stakeholders and the participants of these mini-publics perceive the mini-public newcomer in the cooperative schemes and how they deem its contribution to the policy-making process. This research questions how participants and stakeholders perceive the empowerment of deliberative forums in a policy-making process. Do stakeholders regard mini-publics as detrimental to their influence? Are participants willing to take over some power of the stakeholders? In order to answer these questions, we focus on a major Education Reform in the Belgian French-speaking Community, “Le Pacte pour un Enseignement d’Excellence” (2015–2018). This case features three mini-publics and the characteristics of collaborative governance, that is a substantial collaboration between the State and organized stakeholders in a policy-making process. Based on original data collected through surveys of stakeholders and mini-publics’ participants, this research aims to shed new light on how these two groups perceive each other so as to understand how they can achieve a better coupling.