Conference Agenda

In recent years, the importance of employee wellbeing in public organisations is increasingly being recognised (Borst et al. 2020). This was further highlighted during Covid given the demands and impacts on frontline workers providing essential public services, and in many countries civil service wellbeing levels are yet to return to pre-pandemic levels (Sanders and Ellingwood 2024). Concurrently, issues of workplace harassment and claims of ‘toxicity’ have become more topical, exemplified by #MeToo (Sawer and Maley 2024). As is commonly observed in executive triangle/ménage à trois research in general, often the least understood actor is advisers. This study aims to better extend the research on public sector employee wellbeing to include advisers, and the specific challenges of their unique workplace that is characterised by power and work/life imbalances, job insecurity, and rivalry. Are these workplaces complying with general workplace health and safety norms and even regulations? Does this attract or dissuade particular worker profiles? The focus is on Belgium as one of the progenitors of ministerial cabinets, and draws upon data from the COMPAS survey.

This contribution - which is an extension of the one presented in the same PSG in September 2023 in Zagreb - deals with the role of budgetary advisers in the financing of public policies. Placed at the interface of budgetary decision-making processes, these advisers have paradoxically been the subject of few studies (Eymeri-Douzans, 2020), perhaps because they play a “behind-the-scenes” and highly technical role (Le Clainche, 2020). The purpose of this text is thus to grasp the role of these specific entourages and to understand their role in the design and implementation of ministerial budgets. The case of the Ministry of Culture and its two most significant budget increases during the Fifth Republic – the doubling of the budget in 1982, an extremely rare phenomenon in budgetary history, and its 60% increase during the COVID crisis in 2020-2021 – serves as illustrations to put forward hypotheses that can be transposed to other ministries.

Theoretically, the role of budgetary advisers will be analysed using the concept of ‘decision-making gears’, which was coined by combining the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias. Useful for analysing public policies (Dubois ed., 2024), the sociology of fields makes it possible to grasp the social depth of decision-making gears (Hélie, 2024), by exploring the dispositions, trajectories, and positions of the members of budgetary entourages. The sociology of configurations also makes it possible to grasp the historical dynamics of these decision-making mechanisms, and more specifically the ever-fluctuating state of the ‘balance of power’ between the protagonists of these budgetary decisions.

Based on a range of empirical material (interviews with budget advisers, archives of the President of the Republic, Matignon and ministries), the case of the Ministry of Culture's budget first reveals the importance of the presence, within the ministerial cabinet, of a “bureaucratic capital of experience” - in this case budgetary - gradually acquired by senior officials in the administration's services. Beyond these resources, it is the positions occupied by these budget advisers that merit examination, whether they are formal (merging the functions of budget adviser and deputy head of cabinet) or informal (merging, in an astonishing way, the political and administrative functions of budget adviser and deputy head of the budget office).

The analysis of the configurations also highlights the diversity of ways in which ministerial budget advisers connect to the other entourages (Meert et al., 2023), particularly those of the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister, in the eminently strategic formulation phase (Zittoun, Fisher, Zahariadis eds., 2021) of budgetary options. From this point of view, the doubling of the budget in 1982 resulted in a perfect alignment with the “President's men” (Martigny, Peters, 2024), and especially with the General Secretariat, becoming one of the main supports for the budget of the Ministry of Culture. But the configuration of the Covid crisis also shows that the process of presidentialisation - a central issue of this PSG - can be circumvented by the Prime Minister, provided that strong political support complements the bureaucratic capital of experience of the ministerial advisers.

The green transition is a pivotal social and political challenge of our time, and failure to deliver can yield disastrous results on a global scale. The centrality of the transition also poses challenges for the political decision-making system and the political advisers within it. As such, political advisers hold considerable influence over decision-making on the green transition. However, a crucial tension emerges between the political interests and expertise of advisers in providing advice within the context of evidence-informed decision-making (Cairney 2019). This study examines this fundamental tension through paradox theory, which highlights the importance of competing but interdependent elements in the decision-making process (Cunha and Putnam 2019; Waldman et al. 2019). The paradox theory framework provides a critical examination of the key tensions between the demands of sustainability and political aims, as well as between conflicts of interest and the public interest. A preliminary understanding is that advisers will have to balance different demands and interests, which may result in the slowing down and ineffectiveness of policy action towards sustainability transformation (cf. Smith and Lewis 2011). Conversely, it is crucial to acknowledge these emerging dynamics in research to capture and refine the realities of policy action.

We interview civil servants, experts, and political advisers of the Finnish government, who have worked with policies and programmes related to sustainable development. The semi-structured interviews addressed questions related to the roles, powers, and actions of civil servants and political advisers in sustainability-related policy processes and programmes.

Against this backdrop, this research has two aims. First, the results of the study delineate a broadened and more in-depth appreciation of the sustainability transition and its indisputable conflicts and conflicting interests, which must be clearly identified both in research and practice, as this contributes to identifying impactful solutions for reconciling tensions and making fair decisions in the politico-administrative system. Second, by examining policymaking through an issue with strong political stances but where sector-specific knowledge and cross-sectoral programmes are also important, the research contributes to the under-researched topic of Finnish political advisers, high-ranking civil servants, and their relative powers (and overall relations) in policymaking processes in the Finnish government.