Sidney Ball lecture 2025
- Date 7 November 2025 - 5.00 p.m.
- Location Garden Quad Auditorium, St John's College
‘In this lecture, I will return to fundamental questions that shaped social policy in European welfare states and the EU over the last 40 years, notably the issue of ‘personal responsibility’ versus ‘collective responsibility’, and ‘moral hazard’ as a limit to the organization of collective action and solidarity. These questions apply both to interpersonal relations and to relations between political entities, such as the regions in a federal country, or the Member States of the EU in the EU. I will highlight long-term trends and swings in the ideational debate on personal responsibility, collective action and moral hazard, and revisit the well-known debate on ‘social investment’ as a paradigm for social policy.
The reference to ‘responsibility’ in the lecture’s title finally also refers to my own role: having been both a policy-maker and politician and an academic, the question is also one about the meaning and limits of pragmatism in political action: how can one reconcile, in the realm of social policy, one’s own understanding of social justice and solidarity with the dominant political and budgetary realities of our time?’
Frank Vandenbroucke was born in 1955 and studied economics in Leuven and Cambridge, UK, and received his D.Phil. in Oxford in 1999. He was Minister for Social Security, Health Insurance, Pensions and Employment in the Belgian Federal Government (1999-2004), and Minister for Education and Employment in the Flemish Regional Government (2004-2009). In that period, he played a key role in the ‘activation turn’ in Belgian employment policy. Vandenbroucke was closely involved with the launching of the EU’s Lisbon Strategy in 2000, notably with the development of its social dimension. He was a member of the High Level Group on Social Investment Policies set up by the European Commission (2011-2014). He was the chair of the Belgian Commission on Pension Reform (2013-2014).
Frank Vandenbroucke was full-time engaged in politics until 2011, and then returned to academic research at the Universities of Leuven, Antwerp (in association with the Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy) and Amsterdam. He published on the role of the EU in the development of social policy, patterns of household employment and poverty, social investment, the architecture of the welfare state and the problem of ‘institutional moral hazard’, pension policy, public attitudes on risk-sharing, and child poverty. His publications are available at www.frankvandenbroucke.be.
In 2020, Vandenbroucke returned to politics, to become Minister of Social Affairs and Public Health in the Belgium Federal Government during the Covid 19 pandemic. He currently plays a prominent role in debates on EU health policy. He was re-appointed Minister of Social Affairs and Public Health in January 2025.