The Good, The Bad and the Ugly: integrating multiple frames in Flanders and Wallonia air policies by using the Delphi method

A new European frame has developed stepwise to manage the health effect of air pollution from particulate matter (PM 10 and PM 2,5), backed by an international body of scientific knowledge and OMS reports. The European Union CAFE Directive (2008) leaves the Member States with an important margin to translate the air quality objectives into action plans. In Belgium this policy is entirely left to the regions which developed different frames and decisional spaces. Belgium is a pollution 'hot spot' because of the variety of pollution sources it is faced with (traffic density, industrial density, transboundary pollution). As such, it provides an interesting ground for comparative research.
We conducted a comparative research in the two largest Belgian regions and identified two decisional spaces that differ on a political, administrative and technical levels.
Earlier research on risk management has pointed out that transversality, openness, and interdisciplinarity positively affect the quality of decision making under uncertainty. In that perspective, can specific tools help foster a transversal and integrative approach in air policy? In the Scope-project, a web-based tool using the Delphi method has been tested in the two regions. This allowed to put forward some hypotheses concerning the potential for transversality, interdisciplinary and openness in these different structures and decisional spaces. The results of the experiment and its potential for generalisation will be discussed at length.