Dr. Jolijn De Roover, consultant in the Regional and Local Governance team at IDEA Consult, combines a background in sociology with a passion for the administrative functioning of Flemish cities and municipalities.

In 2021, she obtained a PhD in public administration, political sciences at the University of Antwerp, where she also worked as a postdoctoral researcher. In her postdoctoral research, she mapped out reform scenarios for the Flemish Municipalities Fund. Besides her postdoctoral research, she also taught the course ‘Good Governance’ in the Master’s programme Public Administration, Economics and Law at Tilburg University. She wrote her PhD on local autonomy. More specifically, she wrote about the difference between the formal autonomy of cities and municipalities and the autonomy they use in policy making.

Throughout her doctoral and post-doctoral research, Jolijn has gained experience with various quantitative and qualitative research methods, as well as a good feel for the local administrative reality. She combines this experience to focus on administrative power measurements, mergers and regionalisation within IDEA Consult.