Due to the increasing complexity of municipal tasks, municipalities are increasingly collaborating in intermunicipal partnerships, usually in the form of joint arrangements in the Netherlands. However, the democratic legitimacy of joint arrangements has been under discussion for some time. The question is how to explain and improve the lack of democratic direction and control in common arrangements. The principal-agent theory is used to investigate which mechanisms can explain the lack of direction and control. Four joint schemes in the Dutch Rivierenland region were studied using a questionnaire sent to 44 councillors and 14 interviews with civil servants and political executives. The questionnaire shows that the lack of control is a particular problem. According to the civil servants and political executives interviewed, this is due to the limited attitude of municipalities as commissioning parties. In practice, it turns out to be difficult to formulate clear assignments, there appears to be limited coordination between municipalities and there appears to be a lack of trust between municipal councils and the joint arrangements examined. As a result, joint arrangements have acquired more and more independence vis-à-vis the municipalities, resulting in limited democratic legitimacy.

More and more municipal tasks are carried out in regional partnerships. Little is known about the way in which councillors interpret their roles when it comes to regional cooperation. Research into councillors from the Dutch municipality of Barneveld shows that regional cooperation is necessary for the municipality, but at the same time it removes important issues, powers and influence from local government. Council members feel that they cannot fulfil their supervisory, framework-setting and representative roles sufficiently at regional level. For pragmatic reasons, they often leave the control to the council, they find frameworks complicated and time consuming due to coordination with other councils and they prefer local visibility for the voters. The resulting democratic deficit is seen as a major limitation of regional cooperation. According to experts, democratic legitimacy can be promoted by strengthening the roles of councillors, such as approaching issues from a regional perspective, collaborating with other municipal councils in the region and applying innovative forms of control, framework setting and representation.

What is the international impact of (local) administrative academics from the Netherlands and from Flanders? This essay is limited to their impact through the leading international journal in the field of local government, Local Government Studies. The main question is who published in that journal (Wim Derksen was the first in 1988), from which discipline of the administrative sciences and on which subject. It also discusses from which universities and research institutes the authors come and analyses its gender diversity. Since 1988 we see a growing involvement of Dutch and Flemish authors in Local Government Studies. The fact that the Dutch contribution is more extensive and multifaceted than the Flemish one can be explained from the history of the (local) administrative sciences in these two countries. The Dutch lead is mainly due to the actions of various high-profile administrative academics who have left their mark in this field over the past hundred years. The strongest growth among the different disciplines of the administrative sciences is in public administration as a discipline with a strongly interdisciplinary character. This applies especially to the Netherlands, while in Flanders this development started a little later. In the Netherlands, public administration in the first period still lags behind political science and economics, in the latter two periods it is the dominant factor. In Flanders, the discipline of public administration has only become dominant recently (2017-2022). Another striking difference with the Netherlands is that economists play only a marginal role in this.

This contribution concerns a report of an exploratory study into the influence of working from home on the management of those concerned of and by Dutch municipalities. First of all, theoretical expectations have been formulated that deal with the way in which working from home can influence the management of these related parties. To use process tracing as an analysis method, these expectations were operationalized in the methodological framework, so that evidence could be formulated that had to be found in the collected data to demonstrate the mechanism. Subsequently, about twenty structured interviews were held with employees from twenty different municipalities in order to gain insight into the presumed mechanisms. Based on these twenty interviews, it can be concluded that working from home has indeed influenced the management of those concerned by municipalities, but that this has not led to a reduction in the safeguarding of public interests.