@phdthesis{01K4NP22BXHANMEP8519D10G8C,
  abstract     = {{Flanders is assumed to have a neocorporatist governance tradition, where select civic actors play an institutionalized role in collaborative policy deliberation throughout all governmental levels. Some researchers note that globalization and marketization trends challenge the stability of this model. They warn of an evolution towards a postcorporatist model where increased accountability demands and heightened competition among a widening field of potential policy stakeholder erode the attention given to civil society actors' traditional policy advocacy role. It is assumed they increasingly favor their community-building and service delivery roles, which are believed to be more broadly recognized as legitimate and which are additionally credited to be more helpful in guaranteeing organizational survival. At the very least, these concerns note that there are increasing constraints vis-a-vis strategic agency, leading to less confrontational advocacy. Most dramatically, some warn of a shift towards the “primacy of politics,” where elected officials’ responsiveness to civil society's political role is sidelined on principle. These dynamics call for further research and empirical grounding across different levels of government and  along different sectors.
We focus on a specific form of Policy Advocacy Effectiveness: the factors that make advocacy ‘actionable.’ We conceptualize this as the extent to which individual municipal policymakers are responsive to advocate-championed policy inputs during the policy process and how this responsiveness is influenced by different configurations of advocacy strategies.
We do this through a four-stage approach: 
First, we conceptualize PAE through a scoping literature review, identifying five outcome categories. Noting a research bias toward policy cycle outcomes, we aim to innovate by focusing on individual policymaker behavior as a key foundational element of policy and societal change.
Second, we examine the impact of strategic advocacy choices through an experimental survey aimed at municipal policymakers. We find that they are somewhat more responsive to direct, professional advocacy.
Third, based on interviews with municipal policymakers and NPO-staff  in Flanders, we investigate legitimacy perceptions on different advocacy strategies, revealing strong shared expectations favouring structured, trust-based, collaborative engagement over confrontational tactics.
Finally, based on the same interviews featured in the third step, we assess the motivational and contextual factors that drive individual actors to engage in sustained policy learning within a collaborative governance setting. Our results show that the advocacy efforts we examined foster incremental policy changes rather than systemic reforms through a hierarchical structure with a clear division of roles, where advocates act as signal-givers and policymakers as decision-makers.}},
  author       = {{Brusseel, Aaron}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  pages        = {{200}},
  publisher    = {{Antwerp University. Faculty of Social Sciences ; Ghent University. Faculty of Economics and Business Administration}},
  school       = {{Ghent University}},
  title        = {{Actionable advocacy? How poverty NPOs influence Flemish municipal policymakers’ willingness to act}},
  year         = {{2025}},
}