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

Mini-publics are small face-to-face deliberative forums gathering lay citizens to provide decision makers with recommendations on a particular topic. They are increasingly used as a way to cure the malaise of representative democracy (Newton & Geissel, 2012). In order to maximize their potential, scholars have explored the ways to incorporate these deliberative forums into the policy-making process (Gastil, Ryan, & Smith, 2017). Hitherto, they have however neglected 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. We collected original data 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 better understand how they can achieve a better coupling. In this case, we will se that coupling is not likely to be achieved. Indeed, the traditional democratic preferences of the stakeholders, the rather top-down role they assign to mini-publics and the lack of communication between both sites prevents them to fuel each other with their ideas and arguments. Also, we will see that the perceptions of the participants vary significantly depending on the design features of the particular mini-public they participated in