21st century company law in Belgium

The new Belgian Code of Companies and Associations (BCCA) of 23 March 2019 entered into force on 1 May 2019 (See section 8 for the details.). The BCCA is divided in five parts, and further subdivided in different books. The first part, from book 1 to book 3, contains the general provisions that apply to companies, associations and foundations. Part 2 contains provisions specifically applicable to the different types of companies. Part 3 continues with the provisions that apply to associations and foundations. Part 4 deals with the restructuring and the transformation of the legal form and the last Part 5 contains provisions on the European legal forms

Linefish resources annual report for the year 2000. Part 3: towards a management plan for the Mozambican line fishery

The dependence of Mozambique on its marine resources is highly significant. There is a need for a plan of action for sustainable use of these important resources, for the benefit of the nation. In this document, some aspects are included, that can be important to take into consideration for a sound action plan for the lin fishery of Mozambique

ICT–supported reforms of service delivery in Flemish cities: testing the concept of 'information ecology'

This paper explores organizational reforms in Flemish cities related to making the cities’ individual service delivery more efficient, customer orientated, customer friendly and integrated. The paper is the first one of a recently started research project and PhD research about the complexity of managing ICT-supported change of ‘individual’ service delivery. The overall objective of this paper is to set the stage for the research project’s research design in terms of its theoretical framework. Therefore, we report about our first explorative, inductive and descriptive findings related to this type of change within one city. We firstly inductively report about the objectives and the objects of change. Secondly, we develop a provisional theoretical framework. We therefore take the notion of an information ecology as a conceptual starting point and use a combination of elements of neo-institutional theory, system theory and a political perspective on organizational development. In order to explore the potentialities of this approach, we test the framework’s value for understanding the changes within the city. The framework enabled us to describe and analyze this type of reforms without neglecting the complexity of these changes. It tries to link some important public administration theories to the study of the e-government phenomenon that is still an important challenge. The most important lesson is that further refinement of the conceptual framework is needed. Although the analysis shows that the framework offers a conceptual basis to analyze front and back office reforms within public organizations, it still lacks a full and straightforward operationalization of its components, constructs, relations, etc

Innovating the delivery of individual services within Flemish cities: inventory of ICT-driven heterogeneity

Flemish cities are setting up large scale reform trajectories to make their transactional service delivery more customer orientated, customer friendly and integrated. The implementation of new ICTs plays a key role in these innovation processes; there seems to be a great, technological deterministic, belief in the possibilities offered by for example mid office technologies. In this paper, we explore and compare such innovation trajectories within two Flemish cities. We describe the context, the object, the process and the evaluation of change. Based on this inductive analysis, we reflect upon the dependent and independent variables that structure the processes of change. We make use of a ‘neo-institutional theoretical lens’ to identify relevant internal and external institutional factors that shape the implementation context for the organizational changes. The analysis generates interesting findings. Whereas the external environment to a large degree functions as a stable variable, the heterogeneity between both cities is much more determined by the organizational ‘path’, i.e. the management model, capacities, subcultures, existing ICT-infrastructure, etc. Further research is needed as important questions remain unanswered. For example: does the mixed set of organizational, technological and cultural changes also actually produces the outcomes that were formulated in terms of both increased effectiveness and efficiency

Local governments' participation in intergovernmental e-government projects: a comparative network analysis of two case study's

Both the Belgian federal and Flemish regional government have framed the development of a series of authentic information sources as a key solution to reduce administrative burden for companies and citizens as these crossroads banks allow the sharing of information between different government agencies at different levels of government. The ultimate goal is to realize a more integrated, efficient and effective government service delivery towards citizens and companies. In our paper, we will compare the results of two case studies that elaborated on the participation of local governments within these intergovernmental data sharing projects. In the first case study (Snijkers, 2006a, 2006b), the connection of Flemish local welfare agencies on to the Crossroads Bank for Social Security (CBSS) was analysed. The second case study provides insights in the disclosure of the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (CBE) towards Flemish cities and municipalities. Both case studies made use of network literature to explain the participation of local governments agencies within the projects. In particular, the authors (Snijkers, 2004; Snijkers, 2005; Vander Elst, Rotthier & De Rynck, 2011) mainly made use of Snellen’s (2003) theoretical framework complemented with other theoretical insights about how networks function (see Kumar & van Dissel, 1996; Schermerhorn, 1975). Following Snellen, networks consist of three different dimensions: a strategic, a power and an institutional dimension. The power dimension refers to the dependencies between the network’s stakeholders (e.g. money, expertise, information, …). The strategic dimension refers to the degree to which the objectives of the different members of the network con- or diverge to each other. Finally, the institutional dimension concerns the degree to which the interaction between the different stakeholders has been institutionalized. Both studies offers us the opportunity to conduct a reliable comparison as they are conducted based on a similar research design in terms of the research strategy (case study), the research method ((semi structured) interviews with key actors) and the theoretical framework being applied (Snellen’s framework). Moreover in both studies, the same variables were operationalized: conflict, cooperation, dependency, independency and the con- and divergence of the stakeholders’ objectives. In particular, our comparison will focus on how these variables have influenced local welfare agencies and municipalities to connect on to respectively the CBSS and the CBE. Next, we will identify the similarities and differences between both cases and explain these differences based on the network features that characterize both intergovernmental data sharing projects. The objective of this comparative analysis is to generate new empirical findings in how governments are setting up intergovernmental data sharing projects as insights in this phenomenon have remained rare (see for example Yang & Maxwell, 2011; Gil-Garcia, Ae Chun & Janssen, 2009). Next to our ‘empirical objective’, we also want to elaborate on the surplus of using network theories when analysing the development of intergovernmental eGovernment projects and the participation of local government agencies within these projects. In this way, this paper proposal also meets the call for papers in which an appeal is made to elaborate on “which theoretical lenses could be used to help us understand and explain what is happening and it relationships with citizens, business (…)” and to drew attention on to the “the nature and impact of ICT-enabled changes in the public sector and its external relationships.”

Analyzing the performance of third party implementation arrangements a casestudy of private business counters asone-stop-shops: a casestudy of private business counters as one-stop-shops

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the performance of third party implementation arrangements as a specific new mode of governance (Schuppert, 2011). Third party governance is the extension of the state or jurisdiction by contracts or grants to third parties (Frederickson, 2004). To assess the performance of these arrangements, we will make use of the conceptual framework for assessing the performance of policy networks (Voets, Van Dooren & De Rynck, 2008; Voets, De Rynck & Van Dooren, 2010). The framework is composed of three dimensions: product performance, process performance and regime performance. Each dimension consists of multiple components or criteria and cost factors. Empirical data were gathered by means of a single case study. The case concerns the cooperation between private “business counters” that function as one-stop-shops for starting businesses and the Belgian federal government that contracted out a number of public processes towards these “business counters” (see Vander Elst & De Rynck, 2011). Application of the framework leads to the following research questions: •Product performance: does the policy network (or the arrangement being studied) meets its objectives in terms of an increasing service delivery effectiveness? What is the cost per unit of outcome? •Process performance: has the arrangement obtained formal and informal legitimacy? Does the policy network gives accountability to its members, the community and its parent organizations? Is the policy network being held accountable for the network activities? Is there accordance in terms of issues offered for consent, mechanisms to give consent and status of consent? What is the time or money invested to ensure certain levels of legitimacy, accountability and/or accordance? •Regime performance: how does the number of members affect the performance of the policy network? To which degree has the network achieved in acquiring an institutional position? What is the quality of the relationships between the actors involved in the policy network? What are the costs linked to ensuring regime performance? The second objective of our paper is to consider the value of the theoretical model by determining its surplus to empirical analyze third party implementation arrangements and the correctness of its use of underlying assumptions and building blocks: a multidimensional performance concept, a multi-level performance concept and multiple levels of assessment. Assessing the performance of third party implementation arrangements is both useful from an academic point of view as from a practical perspective because the increase in government contracting over the past several decades presents additional challenges to accountable, representative government (Cohen & Eimicke, 2011) and because the amount of evaluative research about the performance of specific governance arrangements remains limited (Klijn, 2008)

Dirichlet-to-Neumann maps on bounded Lipschitz domains

The Dirichlet-to-Neumann map associated to an elliptic partial differential equation becomes multivalued when the underlying Dirichlet problem is not uniquely solvable. The main objective of this paper is to present a systematic study of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map and its inverse, the Neumann-to-Dirichlet map, in the framework of linear relations in Hilbert spaces. Our treatment is inspired by abstract methods from extension theory of symmetric operators, utilizes the general theory of linear relations and makes use of some deep results on the regularity of the solutions of boundary value problems on bounded Lipschitz domains