Between blueprint and bricolage: how sectoral logics shape regional governance in Flanders

Regions are often portrayed as promising arenas for policy integration, yet in practice they emerge as fragile and contested governance spaces. This paper examines how sectoral statecraft - the capacity of central departments to reproduce state authority through differentiated modes of sectoral intervention - shapes regional governance in Flanders. Through a comparative analysis of three centrally steered policy programmes, the study shows how fragmentation within a departmentalised state produces institutional ambiguity: regional arrangements that are formally established yet weakly embedded. By linking debates on departmentalism, functional coordination pressures, institutional legacies and bottom-up dynamics, the paper advances an interpretive framework that conceptualises institutional ambiguity as both a constraint on coherence and an enabler of adaptive regional governance.