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At the very moment that humanity is facing a broadening ecological crisis, and that both policy makers and civil society are calling for a transition towards more sustainable societies, modern science seems incapable of providing operational solutions for managing this transition. In this context, both Noble prize laureates and high-level science officials have stressed the need of an in depth transformation of the modes of organization of scientific research for governing the transition to sustainable societies. However, existing analyses of on-going initiatives show that most of the barriers to a major, consolidated effort in sustainability science will not be removed without far-reaching institutional change. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an incremental institutional change approach, based on a gradual institutionalization process of existing initiatives. The analysis in this paper shows that strategic research for sustainability and reform of research funding mechanisms will only be effective if they are supported at the same time by reforms of career and training paths at higher education institutions. To promote this vision, the paper proposes a set of capacity building measures that can be undertaken at the level of research funding, higher education institutions and networking.

After years of political crises and negotiations, the deep-rooted conflict between Dutch- and French-speaking parties recently led to the 2011 agreement concerning a further reform of the Belgian state. This reform mainly furthers decentralises the – already federal – state structure, including the allocation of additional competences and fiscal powers to sub-national entities (Regions and Communities). But this new state reform also brings about a radical reform of the upper house: the Belgian Senate. Since 1995, the Senate was composed of three different types of members: Senators directly elected by two linguistically separated electorate (the Dutch-speaking and the French-speaking electorates), Senators indirectly elected by the Community parliaments and Senators coopted by the two other types. The French- and German-speaking linguistic minorities had a fixed amount of seats in this assembly. The reform of the state radically changed the legislative competences of the Senate and its composition as its members will now be designated by Regional and Community parliaments (plus 10 coopted senators). Broadly speaking, the appointment of the majority of the Senators moved from a system of direct and language-based election to a system of indirect and mixed regional and language-based designation. This change is not without consequence for the representation of linguistic minorities. In May 2014, regional, community and federal elections will be organised in Belgium, testing for the first time this new system of designation of Senators by regional and community parliaments. This paper intends to present the 2013 reform of the Senate in Belgium and its consequence for the representation of linguistic minorities. The situations before and after the reform of the Senate will be compared, not only in terms of the way Senators are appointed but in terms of its consequence on the linguistic aspects of the regional and community elections campaign and of the profile of the appointed Senators.

Ever since the 1990's, deliberative theory has been heralded as the most promising new theory on political legitimacy. Democratic deliberation, conceived as the rational exchange of arguments, is claimed to improve the quality of democratic decision making because it instigates a more considered judgment; it allows citizens to hear other perspectives to a problem and to question their own opinions. However, deliberation's beneficial effects do not come about easily. If deliberative mini-publics want to contribute to the legitimacy of political decision making, they have to reflect the principles of legitimacy in their own functioning. It is therefore crucial to assess the internal legitimacy of deliberative mini-publics before making claims about their contribution to the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. In this paper, we set out to assess the input, throughput and output legitimacy of four deliberative events, namely the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly, the Irish "We, The Citizens"-project, the Belgian G1000, and the Dutch Burgerforum. Based on a most-similar comparison of these cases, we argue that their internal legitimacy differs a great deal, and that this is due to factors relating to their process design, such as funding and recruitment.

What are the outputs and effects of deliberative mini-publics? This is probably one of the most critical questions for any deliberative endeavor. In the realm of large-scale deliberative experiments, the G1000 in Belgium holds a special place: it happened in the wake of the longest government formation ever, it sought to gather 1000 randomly selected citizens in Brussels to discuss key social and political issues, and, above all, it was a fully citizen-led initiative. Its organizers explicitly sought to avoid any political and institutional ties and their focus was much more on guaranteeing a high representativeness and a qualitative process, rather than generating strong political outcomes. While the G1000 did well in terms of representativeness and open agenda setting, the political uptake was very limited in the short term. In the longer term, however, it seems that the effects of the G1000 were larger than initially expected. A rich set of empirical data is used to analyze the interaction between the G1000 with the entire political system by looking at the relation with the media, public opinion, political parties and MPs, and other experiments in deliberative democracy. Such endeavor sheds light on the "so what" question which is key to the development of real-world deliberative democracy.

Ever since the 1990's, deliberative theory has been heralded as the most promising new theory on political legitimacy. Democratic deliberation, conceived as the rational exchange of arguments, is claimed to improve the quality of democratic decision making because it instigates a more considered judgment; it allows citizens to hear other perspectives to a problem and to question their own opinions. However, deliberation's beneficial effects do not come about easily. If deliberative mini-publics want to contribute to the legitimacy of political decision making, they have to reflect the principles of legitimacy in their own functioning. It is therefore crucial to assess the internal legitimacy of deliberative mini-publics before making claims about their contribution to the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. In this paper, we set out to assess the input, throughput and output legitimacy of four deliberative events, namely the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly, the Irish "We, The Citizens"-project, the Belgian G1000, and the Dutch Burgerforum. Based on a most-similar comparison of these cases, we argue that their internal legitimacy differs a great deal, and that this is due to factors relating to their process design, such as funding, recruitment and moderation.

Recruiting candidates for local elections is a complex task. Even though some parties find difficult to attract candidates (mainly due to the decreased party membership and the lack of interest for local politics), one of the most important concerns is related to the subtle balance between different types of candidates on the list. Local parties need candidates who embody two main functions: (1) to attract votes (in open list systems) and (2) to serve the interests of the party once elected. As a result, party leaders place on their electoral list candidates who belong to the party structure (incumbent councilors, party members, etc.) as well as candidates who would attract more votes (for example by including 'external' candidates on the list). Following a large data collection process, this paper relies on a quantitative analysis of the 986 lists that participated in the 2012 local elections in the 262 Walloon municipalities (Belgium). The presence of different types of candidates (incumbent mayor and alderman, incumbent councilor, party member, party activist, external candidate, etc.) will be measured for each individual list. In a second stage, the paper will identify the factors that explain variation of the presence of such candidates across lists and municipalities with the help of demographic factors (size of the municipality, rural vs. urban, etc.), political factors (ideology of the list, independence from the national party, etc.) and party competition factors (number of competing lists, electoral alliances, etc.). Overall, this research seeks to uncover the diversity of local electoral strategies guiding local recruitment and why it matters for the electoral results of the lists.