Emerging Trends within the Public Sector in Flanders. Towards a Self-Organising Centre of Government

At the moment, the public sector all over Europe undergoes an efficiency and effectiveness cure. The financial economic crisis sheds another light on several changes. It surely rises, more than ever, another dimension in the debate: “reaching more with less resources”. With this paper, we wish to analyze the situation in the Flemish government more closely. Changes in the socio-economic environment of the public sector challenge their internal management. Increasingly, organizations perform their managerial tasks in a result- oriented way, often by introducing private sector managerial techniques. More and more, innovative management techniques and mechanisms are explored, whether on a small project based scale or on a larger scale. So there is the rise of “new” policy instruments and the way administrations organize themselves. In this paper, we examine the way the Flemish Department of Public Governance and the Chancellery is dealing with its new role as centre of government. Such a Centers of Governments are gaining importance in a complex political scenery confronted with wicked issues within a changing societal context. Besides its positioning within the societal context, there is also a major internal shift within the department. Inspired by innovative management techniques, a transition is going on from a rather classical hierarchical structure to a network governance structure constituted by a set of self-organizing teams. In the paper, we present the changing positioning of the department and the way the internal transition is initiated and implemented further. Besides, in the empirical part of the paper, we also use the data of a survey within the organization dealing with the support of the transition and the new working principles.