A Belgian Case Study: Lack of Age-friendly Cities and Communities Knowledge and Social Participation Practices in Wallonia

This chapter presents a case study from a qualitative survey of 12 Walloon cities that received public grant from Walloon Region’s Minister of Health to organize actions inspired by the age-friendly cities and communities (AFCC) World Health Organization (WHO)’s framework. The aims of the chapter is to show how this AFCC framework can serve to local actors to pursue their own objectives, even if they have a little or poor knowledge of what AFCC might produce. The first section recalls the presence of the ‘municipality advisory councils of seniors’ (Conseils consultatifs communaux des aînés or CCCA) as a form of pre-existing seniors’ social participation, i.e. before the AFC experiment. It then explains how the WHO’s framework has been selectively adopted by regional public policy in 2012-2013. After the presentation of our research method in second section, the third part of the chapter presents empirical data’s: first, it explores the diversity of profiles and experiences of the three types of local actors implied into the processes (elected politicians, senior citizen representatives and administration clerks, the last one might be equivalent to “project management officer” in AFCC); second, it shows how problematic is the use and reference to the assessment of needs and resources of seniors at local level by such actors; third, it presents the central role of the local administrative clerks to give a certain coherence to the senior’s social participation in practice. In conclusion, the chapter lays the milestones of a more realistic use of the AFC framework by discussing the need to better articulate it to existing practices such as the CCCA or recent experiences of ‘participatory diagnostics’