This project aims to explain the policy relevance of local advisory councils (LACs) in Flemish local government. LACs are a particular form of 'deliberative participation' situated at the crossroads of participatory democracy (civil society) and representative democracy (local government). In the LAC, actors from both groups interact to issue policy advice in a particular policy field. Despite their omnipresence and their promise to remedy the acclaimed democratic deficit in representative democracy, however, the policy effects of LACs have not been asserted systematically yet. Drawing on the policy advice literature, our project examines under which conditions LAC advice gets implemented in practice, hence LACs contribute to building better policy. On the basis of a mixed method design, which involves the sequential application of QCA, process tracing and expertinterviews, we test a conceptual model that operationalizes LAC policy relevance as a function of supply (network relevance and coherence), demand (local government size and ideology, motivations and characteristics of decisionmakers), and the intersection of both (network autonomy, metagovernance, and advice). To capture the entire policy advice system and the impact of these concepts, we study two advices in four LAC types in six municipalities (N=48) selected on the basis of size, ideology and LAC organizational culture. Data collection involves document analysis and expert interviews with relevant stakeholders.