Reforms of Justice and Police in Belgium: How do chiefs of Corps come to know the managerial change?

This presentation is inscribed in a research project called JAM - Justice And Management. It intends to understand the reform projects and change processes unfolding in the Belgian Justice and Police fields nowadays by studying the three complementary points of view of the external stakeholders, field actors and chiefs of Corps who are managers of this two regal institutions.
The research relies on a qualitative methods including semi-structured interviews (n=50), focus groups (n=3) and case studies (n=7). It is based on a longitudinal approach which implies to meet the chiefs of Corps include in my sample at a time T0 (i.e. when the Reforms were launched) and a time T+1 (after two years of implementation). This longitudinal approach helps to see how the Reforms have been initially translated by different chiefs of Corps and how such local translations are changing over time.
In this presentation, I intend to demonstrate how chiefs of Corps made sense of the reforms’ projects, thus producing very specific and local knowledge of federal Reforms. The two Reforms launched in 2014 are in line with the past changes in the Justice and Police fields, which were characterised by principles specific to the New Public Management (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). Both Reforms lead to an intensification of the corresponding logic in the regal domains. Despite this similarity, the Justice and Police Reforms depends on very different legal documents. On the one hand, the Justice Reform is based on a framework law, “where everything remains to be defined” and on the other hand, the Police Reform is based on a program which supports and even compels.
By analysing both Reforms at their beginning and after two years of implementation, we will show that, although they are responsible for the implementation of different projects (justice/police) framed in different ways (flexible vs containing framework), our sample of chiefs of Corps enacted similar logics at different times. We will propose to define these logics as, first, the moderation logic that implies a partial implementation of the reform’s principles to preserve old ways of functioning; the re-appropriation logic, which entails recycling existing structures and procedures to limit the impacts of Reforms or speed up in its implementation; and finally, the extension logic, which is characteristic of a broad interpretation of the possibilities given by the laws. We will then suggest that these three logics represent the different ways in which the chiefs of Corps are trying to make sense (Weick, 1995) of ambiguous and undesired reform’s projects, by relying on their situated experiences and knowledges of the “reform in practice”.