Ethno-racial (in)equality: a typology of employment policy frames in Belgium

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the framing of ethno-racial inequalities within policy discourses. In particular, it sets out a typology to characterise different policy frames concerning ethno-racial (in)equality within Belgian employment policies. The typology conceptualises ‘ethno-racial (in)equality policy frames’ along two dimensions, distinguishing between colour-blind and colour-conscious policy frames, on the one hand, and redistributive and non-redistributive policy frames, on the other hand. By bringing these two axes together, the typology allows highlighting how policy frames combine distinct ideas about the recognition of race or ethnicity and economic redistribution. The article builds on empirical data from a study on Belgian employment policies. Through a critical frame analysis of policy documents, it shows how the prevailing representations of ethno-racial (in)equality in the policy discourses of the federal, Flemish, and Walloon governments in Belgium can be captured by diverging types of policy frames. In this way, the article demonstrates how the typology can serve as an analytical tool for understanding and comparing the framing of ethno-racial inequalities across political-institutional contexts and provide new insights into how policy frames are positioned with regard to two important dimensions of social justice: recognition and redistribution.

KEYWORDS:

• Inequalities
• racism
• critical race theory
• employment policy
• Belgium

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this article. The author would also like to express her gratitude to Ilke Adam and Saskia Bonjour for their helpful feedback while carrying out the research and drafting the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This article uses the adjective ‘ethno-racial’ to denote both more culturally grounded and more biologically grounded identity markers and acknowledge the interrelation between them. Especially within the European continental context, the social constructs of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ (Hall 2017) are strongly intertwined in practice and thus difficult to separate (see: Essed 1996, 8–9; Grosfoguel 2004). Therefore, the term ‘ethno-racial’ is used in this article to qualify the inequalities that migrants and minorities are faced with in this context.

2 In this article, a policy frame is defined as a set of ideas that help actors to define a policy problem and formulate the appropriate policy response (Verloo 2005, 19–20). By specifying what the problem is about, what should be done about it and who should take action, a policy frame provides a story for framing a policy problem (Verloo 2005; Schön and Rein 1994).

3 Literally meaning ‘from another land’, the term ‘allochthone’ (allochtoon in Dutch, the antonym being ‘autochthone’, autochtoon in Dutch) has been used in Flemish and Dutch policy discourses since the 1970s to refer to people who are of foreign birth or ancestry. The term has increasingly been contested because of its pejorative and racially informed character (Yanow and van der Haar 2013; for an overview of the debate on this term in Flanders, see: Severs 2015).