Initiating joint institutional experimentation (IE): negotiations on sectoral collective bargaining structures in Belgium

For several years, institutions of social dialogue, like a sectorial level, have been facing big changes (financiarisation, globalization, digitalization, pandemic, geopolitical conflicts, etc.) Such challenges impact the legitimacy and the representation of actors engaged in the social dialogue at the sectoral level (OECD, 2019 ; OIT, 2024). In this perspective, they are forced to launch experiments to maintain (or even recover) part of their power
(Laroche et Murray, 2024 ; Murray et al, 2020).
This paper aims at explaining why and how social partners engage into joint institutional
experimentation when they are used to interact within established structures of collective
bargaining at sector level in Belgium: why and how do the actors involved in an existing
structure of collective bargaining jointly try to change it into a new structure?
To answer this question, we use a gradual perspective on institutional experimentation. Firstly, we approach structures of sector-level social dialogue (joint committees) as institutions defined as “sets of rules that are enforced or complied with by actors and organizations of various sorts” (Thelen, 2009: 490). As such, sectoral joint committees result from political compromises, products of power relations and negotiations between social groups. By crystallizing issues of power, they remain subject to criticism and reshaping (Kristensen & Morgan, 2012). Therefore, institutional experimentation necessarily implies power relations and bargaining between the actors involved.
Empirically, the article analyzes four original cases of experimentation in two sectors in
Belgium: two cases in commerce and two in the health sector, with data collected from
2023 to 2025 by the means of documents, non-participant observation and semistructured
interviews. Both sectors are experiencing major disruptions to their employment systems: labor shortages, sector attractiveness, intensification and flexibilization of work, and the rise of performance-based approaches (Baccaro and Howell, 2017; Gracos, 2019; 2021). Our article includes four case studies of institutional experimentation, all of which involve collective actors addressing these issues in order to test new solutions. We pay attention to the practices deviating from existing structures of social dialogue, both at the sectoral and organizational levels, power games around formal and informal rules, and attempts to build new spaces, sometimes with new actors and new topics of discussion.
Instead of different “types” of institutional experimentation, the cases rather illustrate
different paths that can lead to either stability or change, depending on the bargaining
dynamics that occur between the actors involved. Institutional experimentation consists
in compromise-building and, consequently, the outcome is necessarily uncertain, with
possible steps forward and backwards. Finally, we can explain why distinct trajectories
occur by the possibility of a compromise in which none of the actors involved loses out,
based on the risk calculation they make along the trajectory, and the absence of threat on
the established political compromise that materialized in the pre-existing institutional
routines.