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

Abstract

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 aim of the chapter is to show how the 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 preexisting seniors’ social participation, i.e., before the AFCC experiment. It then explains how the WHO’s framework has been selectively adopted by regional public policy in 2012–2013. After the presentation of the research method in second section, the third part presents empirical data’s: first, it explores the profile’s diversity and experiences of three types of local actors involved into the processes (elected politicians, senior citizen representatives, and civil servants, the last one might be equivalent to “project management officer” in AFCC); second, it shows how problematic is the senior’s needs and resources assessment  at local level for such actors; third, it presents the central role of local administration civil servants to give coherence to the senior’s social participation in practice. In conclusion, the chapter lays the milestones of a more realistic use of the AFCC framework by discussing the need to better articulate it to existing practices such as the CCCA or recent experiences of ‘participatory diagnosis.’