Belfast Revisited: Everyday Policy-making in a Contested Environment

A year before the much celebrated 1998 Good Friday Agreement; the Belfast electorate returned a hung Council to govern their city. The following years facilitated a transition from hegemonic or domination mechanisms of conflict management towards the traditionally more acceptable approach of power-sharing. Such a change provides an opportunity to understand the nature of public policy within an emerging power-sharing environment. Drawing on evidence from interviews with Belfast’s bureaucratic elite, this article investigates how power-sharing changes the nature of elite level bureaucrat responsibilities within a contested society. If consociational power-sharing is to be the conflict management model of choice, it is necessary that we understand the role of the supporting institutions in driving its success. Existing public administration research would lead us to expect greater bureaucrat involvement in the traditionally more mundane aspects of policy formulation, while in areas of greater public and political interest we would expect greater political involvement in the decision-making process. Converse to these expectations however, evidence from Belfast suggests that the bureaucratic elite are found to play a pivotal role in the day-to-day management of power-sharing. For this reason, developing administrative capacity is not only a necessary condition for good governance but also for conflict management. Conflict management research must therefore pay closer attention to the role of the bureaucrat in the conflict management process.