Challenged or championed by local political leadership? The democratic anchorage of local governance networks in Kortrijk (Belgium)

In this paper we try to scrutinize the role of local executive politicians in relation to the democratic anchorage of the local governance landscape in Flanders (Belgium). Since we can only pursue this by opening the black box of local governance, we need to figure out how local political leadership works in practice in order to fully understand its consequences with regards to local democracy. In the Kortrijk region one can identify a proliferation of local network-like arrangements. Local governments establish relationships with e.g. autonomous agencies, other governments, private organizations or with a combination of these. This new organizational layer on top of the local political landscape challenges traditional merits of local democracy like popular control, local sovereignty and the primacy of politics. A central issue concerning these new arenas is their democratic anchorage or how to link them with the classic institutions of representative democracy. From a liberal point of view it is argued that local elected politicians are the lynchpin between both worlds. Yet we realized in our case study that some local executive politicians, especially mayors, use these opened-up politics to strengthen their own steering potential with regards to strategic and wicked policy cases. Hence they rather cherish the policy-entrepreneurial opportunities of local governance networks than to play the watchdogs for their own local government institutions. Moreover we noted that analogous to the number of network-like arrangements also the number of potential representative and accountability relations for these leading politicians has multiplied. Hence in terms of accountability we not only witness a challenge of “too many hands” but also a problem of “too many eyes”. However from a post-liberal point of view this proliferation of actors and forums also offers opportunities for genuine deliberation. Hence analysing the democratic anchorage of these arenas is a balancing act