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Abstract :
[en] This paper examines the implementation of the “Marshall Plan for Wallonia” (MP), a 2005 strategic policy program that aims to enhance the Walloon region’s competitiveness and generate innovation-driven economic growth. Actively marketed by the government, the MP’s rationale is endorsed by labor unions and employers’ organizations, leaving no room for political controversy. The absence of outspoken conflict is remarkable since the MP (1) reconfigures the relationship between science, technological innovation and the market, (2) encompasses a fifth of regional budget resources, and (3) picks few winners, i.e. those belonging to what the Plan conveys as strategic R&D domains for Wallonia. In other policy fields, such as employment, taxes and labor costs, opposition is more pronounced and protracted.
The paper asks how a strong consensus among these actors is constructed and sustained, given the potential for considerable disagreement among involved parties / stakeholders.
To address the reasons for a broad consensus, the paper specifically examines the master narratives at play in Wallonia’s STI policies. These narratives are locally enacted through regional policies and embedded in the existing STI regime (Pestre 2003, Delvenne 2011), and confronted with future-oriented socio-technical imaginaries associated with active exercises of state power (Jasanoff and Kim 2009). In the case of the MP, we observe a phenomenon of “narrative salience” (Claisse and Delvenne 2012), which characterizes situations that attest to the domination and prominence (at the discursive level, in the institutions and actors' repertoires and routines) of one storyline, acting as a well-routinized script that is accepted and enacted rather than questioned.
