Belfast Revisited: Everyday Policymaking in a Contested Environment

Abstract

A year before the much celebrated 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the Belfast electorate returned a hung Council to govern their city. The following years facilitated a transition from hegemonic or domination mechanisms of conflict management towards the traditionally more acceptable approach of power-sharing. Such a change provides an opportunity to understand the nature of public policy within an emerging power-sharing environment. Drawing on evidence from interviews with Belfast's bureaucratic elite, this article investigates how power-sharing changes the nature of elite-level bureaucrat responsibilities within a contested society. If consociational power-sharing is to be the conflict management model of choice, it is necessary that the role of the supporting institutions in driving its success is understood. Existing public administration research would lead to the expectation of greater bureaucrat involvement in the traditionally more mundane aspects of policy formulation, while in areas of greater public and political interest greater political involvement in the decision-making process would be expected. Converse to these expectations, however, evidence from Belfast suggests that the bureaucratic elite are found to play a pivotal role in the day-to-day management of power-sharing. For this reason, developing administrative capacity is a necessary condition not only for good governance but also for conflict management. Conflict management research must therefore pay closer attention to the role of the bureaucrat in the conflict management process.

Keywords:

• Belfast
• public administration
• bureaucrat
• conflict management
• governance

Acknowledgements

This research has been kindly supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council Large Grants Scheme, RES-060-25-0015, 2007-2012. Conflict in Cities and the Contested State: Everyday Life and the Possibilities for Transformation in Belfast, Jerusalem and other Divided Cities. The author would like to thank Professor Brian Smith, Dr Fabrizio de Francesco, Professor Mick Dumper and the two anonymous reviewers for their most useful comments on an earlier draft. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

I am most concerned with the politician–bureaucrat dichotomy. Of course it is acknowledged that factors external to urban governance influence this relationship (such as the Good Friday and St Andrews Agreements, and also interactions with regional, national and supranational bodies, etc.). I am most interested, however, in documenting the changing nature of the bureaucrat–politician relationship, not establishing why the relationship is the way it is.

The fieldwork for Bollens's research was conducted shortly after the first IRA ceasefire in 1994, which ultimately paved the way for the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Power-sharing has been the mode of governance within Belfast City Council since 1997. In 2007 the Council adopted a ‘committee’ governance structure.

Five of those targeted either did not respond or were too busy to be interviewed.

Results from a questionnaire that formed the basis of the semi-structured interview.

Governance in Belfast (since 2007) is by committee. Elected politicians are nominated to a committee which has responsibility for a particular subject area. Unless specifically provided for, decisions of the committee are ratified by Council.

As there is a high degree of segregation in Belfast, politicians tend to represent only one community. Two-thirds of Belfast's population live in areas where over 81% of residents are of the same religion. See Shirlow and Murtagh (2006).

I am not so much concerned with why they rejected the idea, but with the result that they went against the ‘expert’ advice of their bureaucrats.

These characteristics also present themselves in type B decisions; however, such findings are more consequential in type C decisions. In type B decisions, the ‘couching’ and ‘framing’ of the bureaucratic elite is often trumped by the wishes of the political level.

Super output area – a geographical area used to improve the reporting of small area statistics across the UK.

Predominantly a unionist cultural identity.