This book provides a comprehensive examination of the practices of policy analysis in Belgium. It studies the professional practices that organisations and actors entertain to define a problem marked for government concern and to prescribe the measures to solve that problem by policy action or change. Rather than looking at the theories of the policy process (Sabatier and Weible, 2014), it examines what kind of analysis is provided by policy workers, in-house or external to government, as a source of advice for making and improving public policies.

Only recently has empirical research started to map who policy analysts are and what they do. This chapter defends the widely accepted view of policy analysis and aims to catch the full extent of activities conducted by policy analysts both inside and outside government. It relies on a review of literature about policy work, policy advice and policy analysis that denotes a common concern for the various forms of contribution to policy formulation.

Further, this chapter presents the methods used in the following chapters to locate policy analysts and describe their activities. While partly relying on secondary resources, the contributors to this book conducted original research that filled the gaps in knowledge about policy analysis in Belgium. Middle-ranking civil servants were surveyed in the federal and regional governments with the aim of describing in-house policy analysis. To complete the picture, the authors conducted more specific surveys into policy analysis by actors outside government, notably in the Belgian political parties, interest groups and think tanks, and conducted qualitative case studies, for example on local authorities.

The survey of in-house policy analysis helped identify the characteristics of the largest communities of policy analysts in Belgium. This chapter attempts to identify policy-analytical capacities and resources among middle-ranking civil servants. It shows that these resources are important but dispersed in the public organisations, as the career path mainly encourages specialisation in substantive issues. In Belgium, policy analysis is still an emerging profession that is not recognised through explicit labels and job positions.

Policy analysis in the literature on public policy

Policy analysis has different meanings. Since Lasswell (1971), two approaches are usually distinguished, the first being pure academic description and theory building about the policy process (Sabatier and Weible, 2014), and the second being an application of knowledge on policy for providing advice to the policymakers.