In Belgium, policy analysis is relatively young as an academic discipline. It found its way into the academic curricula of universities only towards the end of the last century (De Winter et al, 2007). This is surprising given that policy-analytical models were being disseminated in Belgium in the late 1960s, and only a little later in the Netherlands. While this sparked the policy analysis movement in the Dutch government and academia, policy analysis education in Belgium remained subsequently underdeveloped, and policy-analytical knowledge was taught in a fragmented fashion. The concept of the policy cycle was, for instance, taught on general political science courses, or as a section in a course on public administration. Other policy-analytical knowledge, such as – for example – policy instruments or policy-analytical methods, appeared as part of public management courses, while substantive policy courses such as social policy, socioeconomic policy, and urban planning would touch mainly on the content of policies, rather than their policy scientific understanding or their design. On the basis of document analysis (including the regional university accreditation reports), and a limited number of interviews, this chapter describes the development of policy analysis instruction from a fragmented into a more autonomous discipline. The chapter also touches on two more questions: whether official professional training curricula have come to embrace policy-analytical knowledge, and whether divergences in policy analysis instruction across the language border reflect different practices in government.

Policy analysis as a discipline in Belgium

Policy analysis is a young discipline in both the Flemish and the French Communities of Belgium, dating back to the late 1990s. In order to understand its emergence better, it is useful briefly to trace the development of political science in Belgium. Political science would become one of the main hosts for the development of policy-analytical instruction and unitary Belgian legislation regulated higher education until the country became a federal state. Part of the story told is indeed national, as political science appeared in Belgium before the country split into a federal state, and before higher education became an exclusive competency of the language communities.

The first School of Political and Social Sciences was founded in 1889 in Brussels by Ernest Solvay, a well-known local industrialist in the chemical sector. This school joined the Free University of Brussels in 1897.