Strategic Management in the Welfare State: Practice and Consequences — The Case of Flanders

Abstract

For governments within many modern welfare states it has become a key challenge to guarantee the quality and accessibility of social service provision to citizens. Under the third-party government in Belgium, this implied that far from producing the lion’s share of these services themselves, governments increasingly involved private nonprofit organizations (NPOs) to implement those policies (Salamon et al., 1999). These NPOs have become appealing partners due to their bottom-up nature, a position close to clients and their rather small scale of operation. Hence, it is expected that NPOs have greater opportunities for tailoring services to citizens’ needs and are better able to perform a radar function by signalling new or rather ‘unconventional’ needs as well (Boris and Steuerle, 1999; Salamon, 1995). As a result, the focus of government shifted from ‘rowing’ to ‘steering’ (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992). This implies a separation of the process of planning social policies from the actual implementation of those policies by NPOs (OECD, 2012). In essence, we argue that governments hereby develop a set of strategic management practices in order to steer and control the NPOs that carry out policies, while equally granting them a meaningful voice in the development of new policies as well.