Policy termination as a strategic practice: insights from the Flemish provinces

Abstract Deliberately terminating outdated, inefficient, or redundant policies has become increasingly important for governments operating under persistent challenges and constrained resources. Despite its growing relevance, policy termination remains undertheorized and empirically underexplored, particularly when considered as a strategic practice. As such, this research aims to advance a more comprehensive understanding of policy termination by explicitly examining its underlying strategy. It focuses on the five Flemish provinces, subregional entities in Belgium currently facing both withdrawal of competences and institutional pressure concerning their existence. The research design combines a document analysis of provincial council meeting reports with semistructured interviews conducted with provincial chairs and clerks. All data were systematically coded using established typologies of both policy termination and strategy. The findings show that while policy termination accounts for only a modest share of provincial decision-making, its occurrence across a wide range of policy domains suggests a degree of structural embeddedness rather than mere exceptionality. Furthermore, they reveal that policy termination is only occasionally pursued with strategic intent, yet a clear misalignment between aspirations and capabilities prevents it from functioning as a strategic governance practice at the provincial level. Theoretically, these findings reaffirm policy termination as a legitimate area of inquiry and establish connections between the fields of policy studies and strategic management. They also raise critical questions about the continued applicability of classical approaches to policy termination in today’s complex governance contexts. Practically, the findings offer actionable insides for provincial policymakers seeking to deploy a suitable strategy for policy termination.