Belgian regional parliaments and the European Union: an analysis of parliamentary scrutiny in agricultural and environmental policies

ABSTRACT

Drawing on qualitative case studies of two specific European decision-making processes in the agricultural and environmental sectors, this paper discusses how and why Belgian regional parliaments activated (or not) their control mechanisms to scrutinise their respective regional ministers. The findings show that parliamentary scrutiny of the agricultural and environmental policy fields has undergone a process of institutional and behavioural Europeanisation. Belgian regional parliaments rely mostly on classical parliamentary tools aimed at gathering information and, to a lesser extent, on constraining instruments aimed at influencing their government. Rather than trying to influence the EU negotiations, the MPs try to assess the potential impact of the reforms on their regional policy sectors. The findings also demonstrate that domestic media coverage and political salience of the EU negotiation associated with important implementing powers of regional parliaments have a positive effect on the level of scrutiny conducted by Belgian regional assemblies.

KEYWORDS:

• Subnational parliaments
• regional parliaments
• European integration
• agricultural policy
• environmental policy
• Common Agricultural Policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

François Randour is a researcher at the Institut de Sciences Politiques Louvain Europe (ISPOLE) of the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). His research interests focus on federalism and on the role of the Austrian, Belgian and German (sub)national parliaments in the European Union. François Randour has published articles in the Journal of Common Market Studies, Revue des affaires européennes and in the International Review of Administrative Sciences. Email: [email protected]

Wouter Wolfs is a researcher at the KU Leuven Public Governance Institute (Belgium). He is preparing a PhD in political science on the finance regime of Europarties and political groups in the European Parliament. Furthermore, his research focus is on the functioning of national parliaments in the European Union, the Europeanisation of political parties and Euroscepticism. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1. We identified agricultural and environmental-related questions relying on the thematic categorisation provided by both parliaments. In the Walloon parliament, all parliamentary questions are labelled in themes and subthemes. Actions classified in the broader themes ‘environment’, and several sub-categories labelled under the themes ‘water policy’ and ‘nature protection’ were taken into consideration for environmental policies. For agriculture, we coded actions regrouped under the themes ‘industrial sector: agriculture and sylviculture’, ‘rural developments’ and ‘rural world’. For the Flemish parliament, it is not possible to search directly on themes in the database; we applied a two-step approach. First, to keep our set as broad as possible, we used two general references: ‘agriculture’ and ‘environment’. Second, we narrowed our search results to those parliamentary instruments that were labelled under the themes ‘agriculture and fisheries’ and ‘nature and environment’. In a next step, we took all actions exclusively on fisheries out of the data set.

2. When looking at the agricultural policy field, respectively three MPs for the Walloon parliament and four MPs for the Flemish parliament are responsible for more than 50 per cent of EU scrutiny actions. This trend is also observable, but to a lesser extent, for environmental policies. Five MPs for the Walloon parliament and eight MPs for the Flemish parliament were needed to reach 50 per cent of EU actions.

3. In Flanders: ‘Boeren en Tuinders’ for the Boerenbond. In Wallonia: ‘Plein Champs’ for the FWA.