The word neoliberalism has often been the object of fierce controversy in the Dutch public debate. Prominent intellectuals have equated neoliberalism with extremism and fundamentalism, with some going as far as calling it a ‘totalitarian faith’. The opposite camp in the debate has argued that neoliberalism is largely a self-invented bogeyman of the left, a swearword used by critics to engage in an intellectual witch-hunt. Of course, neoliberalism is not the only social science term suffering from a polemical status. Common concepts such as populism, socialism, nationalism or conservatism have given rise to similar lasting disagreements and comparable accusations of their derogatory use. What does appear to be exceptional about neoliberalism in the Dutch debate, is that very few conceptual and historical studies have been published on the subject. While the word neoliberalism is commonly employed in Dutch mainstream social science, many scholars seem to use the term without much further qualification. This paper explores the controversy and looks for ways to proceed beyond it. Drawing on a recent wave of international scholarship, it outlines an ideational approach to neoliberalism. After tracing the origins of the term neoliberalism, it closes with a preliminary example of an ideational analysis of Dutch neoliberalism.

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Beleid en Maatschappij.

De manier waarop vraag naar en aanbod van arbeid bij elkaar komen, is met de komst van het internet en sociale media drastisch veranderd. Dit brengt kansen met zich mee: werkgevers kunnen zich bij de werving veel directer op potentiële werknemers richten en zijn niet meer gebonden aan de doelgroep van bijvoorbeeld een dagblad. Het geeft echter ook risico’s, omdat het tot uitsluiting van groepen kan leiden. De positieve keerzijde van deze technologische medaille is dat algoritmes en big data weliswaar nieuwe manieren van discriminatie in de hand werken, maar dat ze tevens kunnen worden ingezet om deze discriminatie te traceren en te bestrijden. In dit artikel worden beide zijden van de medaille toegelicht.

Evaluations of EU legislation can fulfill a key role in the European policy process. They can provide the knowledge base required for political accountability towards the electorate, and form a basis for the improvement of existing legislation. This article introduces a research agenda in the realm of the ex-post evaluation of EU legislation, which comprises two research lines. The first strand comprises research into ex post legislative evaluations conducted by the European Commission. This research is innovative, because EU policy researchers so far have barely touched upon evaluation, as a final and important stage in the EU policy cycle. By assessing evaluation critically, we can ascertain to what extent the EU’s ex-post evaluation system is more than an instrument, aimed at increasing the EU’s legitimacy. The second research strand is own evaluation research, focusing on the role of European administrative networks- intergovernmental structures that have been established to improve the implementation of EU legislation by the member states. By critically evaluating the functioning and effectiveness of these networks, I hope to be able to find out whether and under what conditions these network structures are more, than the sum of their national parts.

With her chair in urban development management, Ellen van Bueren investigates policy, governance and management issues. Cities, as economic and cultural centres in our society, are major consumers of resources. They not only contribute to problems such as climate change, but also experience the risks and consequences thereof. Technological solutions to these problems are difficult to implement. They require larger-scale system changes, or encounter resistance. Making cities sustainable not only requires technical solutions, but also institutional innovation. A socio-technical-ecological system approach to cities shows the coherence and complexity of issues. Issues play on multiple scales, are cross-sectoral, and require an interaction of citizens, companies, and governments. Moreover, the playing field between these groups of actors is changing rapidly, technological empowerment in particular has made the citizen a much more equal player alongside the government and business. Existing instruments and approaches are not sufficient to approach sustainability issues. To identify and address these issues, cooperation between science and society is necessary. Multi- and transdisciplinary learning environments enable researchers and students to identify issues, to answer questions and to try out solutions together with stakeholders. Such environments are indispensable for the development of sustainable cities.

In his inaugural lecture entitled ‘From Pillars to Bubbles: The future of consensus governance in a globalized society’, Caspar van den Berg examines the consequences of economic and cultural globalization for the model of consensus governance that defined Dutch public administration for most of the 20th century. In doing so he presents an expansion and refinement of the Lijphartian model of consociationalism, and indicates which four factors supported consensus governance in the pillarized period, and how each of them has suffered erosion as globalization proceeded. It has become increasingly visible that globalization has differentiated effects for different groups in society, but also for different types of regions: booming regions benefit greatly from globalization, shrinking regions face major challenges. By combining recent insights from public administration, sociology, political science, economics and social geography, a new social order emerges, consisting of bubbles that are distinguished along socio-economic and territorial lines. These developments cause friction with regard to representation and decision-making at national, regional and local level. These are the themes on which the research within the Chair of Global and Local Governance will focus in the coming years.

Increasing demands and competing values force public organizations to introduce new organizational forms that veer away from rigid bureaucratic structures while remaining in control. How do public managers and their employees deal with the dilemmas that these decentralized and organic ways of organizing entail? On the one hand it must be prevented that public managers fall back too quickly on structures that rely on control and formalization, while, on the other hand, they themselves as managers are still primarily held accountable based on those bureaucratic principles. New organizational forms also assume that leadership is shared and distributed. This not only asks for a higher degree of self-management of employees, but also requires from formal leaders that such behavior is supported and encouraged. In our research and teaching on these changes in public organizations, we work closely with practice. That too is a matter of balancing, this time of public engagement with scientific independence.

This article presents the research program into governance in a knowledge society of professor Albert Meijer and colleagues at Utrecht University. The knowledge society is a society in which (1) citizens are higher educated that ever before and their level of education largely determines their societal position, (2) knowledge plays a key role in administrative and policy processes and is increasingly contested and (3) technology plays a key role in every facet of societal life. Research into governance of and in the knowledge society requires a transdisciplinary and plural approach to scientific work. Transdisciplinarity entails combining insights from science with various forms of contextual and practical knowledge. A plural approach to scientific works means that we should not only do explanatory empirical work but also theoretical, normative and prescriptive research. The overall ambition of this research program is to contribute to a democratic debate about the governance of the future.

Regulation and markets have become central steering mechanisms in modern states, but have received relatively little attention in public administration. This contribution argues that questions around regulation, monitoring and enforcement deserve more attention in public administration scholarship. It sketches the development of ‘Regulatory Governance’ as a scholarly field, and discusses the added value of a criminological perspective on relations between state and market. A research agenda on ‘naming and shaming’ brings these perspectives together.

The future is inherently uncertain. No certain statements can be made about the future. This means that policy and management always have to deal with long-term ‘future uncertainty’. However, it does matter how we name uncertainty; what words we use for it. What kind of uncertainty do we mean when we talk about uncertainty in policy processes and management? The same applies to the type of preparation for uncertainty that we choose. The question ‘are we prepared’ can also be answered in different ways. In this contribution we identify a variety of types of uncertainty and types of ways of dealing with uncertainty, based on the text of my Inaugural Speech delivered in 2016. I then discuss how these questions have been translated into research and education and which next steps I foresee for myself in the – although inherently uncertain – near future.

The work of Elinor Ostrom suggests that under certain conditions local communities are better able to sustainably manage so-called common pool resources than an external party such as government. In this article I explore whether and to what extent those conditions also apply to the governance of the Dutch welfare state. I show that in the current participation society there are numerous examples in which self-governance seems to be successful and in which Ostrom’s conditions seem to play an important role. On that basis, I come to the conclusion that citizens – under certain institutional conditions – may be better able to resolve social problems among themselves than through external interventions. This requires a shift from public administration to self-administration.

Public Administration as a scientific discipline can increase its scientific and social relevance if it takes a more design-oriented approach. With that I go back to the classical notion of Herbert Simon that public administration is a design science. I advocate revitalizing that idea. This is necessary if we look at the problems governments are struggling with, but also in view of the developments in the environment of our field. But it is also promising because it offers opportunities to achieve innovative, scientific knowledge. The design sciences contain numerous insights into how a public administration design process can be set up, with room for creativity, abduction and intuition. I divide a public design process into five rounds: the round of understanding the issue, defining or demarcating it, coming up with possible solutions, testing and refining these solutions and distilling the more generically applicable elements. This is ideally done through fast, iterative rounds of developing, testing and refining designs. In such a design process, disciplinary knowledge can play an important role in understanding the issue and coming up with possible designs. And so designing can also become a way to validate this knowledge.

For a long time, the three governance structures market, hierarchy, and community were regarded as separate entities. The market is based on the price mechanism, the authority mechanism is the basis of the hierarchy, and trust relations characterize the community. As the knowledge economy evolves, there is a shift in thinking about how these governance structures are related. Creating and sharing knowledge are key features of the knowledge economy. However, this knowledge is partly tacit and sharing knowledge is particularly useful among diverse organizations, which are two barriers for sharing of knowledge among organizations.
A new stream of literature suggests that the ability of organizations to combine the three governance structures contributes to their capacity to share knowledge with other organizations. Based on this literature, this article shows what kinds of organizational forms are possible. Besides that, it offer empirical example of the conditions under which these organizational forms evolve as well as how they contribute to organizational innovation.

Changing behavior is often necessary to tackle societal problems. Governments can change behavior via economic incentives (such as subsidies for electric cars), bans/mandates (such as prison sentences for drug smuggling), communication (for example information campaigns) and nudges (for example, being a donor by default). However, the government should not be a manipulator that applies the latest behavioral tricks without societal support. Public administration research shows that support cannot be taken for granted. If there is no support for behavioral change, well-intended interventions can even be counterproductive. I therefore develop a model for supported behavioral change. I provide five criteria that indicate when there is supported behavioral change: if the behavioral change is both effective (1) and efficient (2), and when there is support for behavioral change among politicians (3), among implementing organizations (4), and among citizens (5).

Maar liefst drie onderzoekscommissies brachten een rapport uit over de vermeende politieke beïnvloeding en sturing van onderzoek op het WODC van het ministerie van Justitie en Veiligheid. Maar uit het rapport van de commissie-Hertogh, die de kwestie in een breder perspectief moest plaatsen, komt geen eenduidig beeld naar voren van de ernst, omvang en oorzaken van de problematiek. Deze commissie verzuimt om een grondige analyse te maken van de achtergronden van de kwestie. Ook de methodologie van het onderzoek van de commissie-Hertogh rammelt, op zijn zachtst gezegd. En de aanbevelingen van deze commissie gaan voorbij aan het belang van interactie tussen beleidsmakers en onderzoekers. Het rapport voldoet niet aan de kwaliteitseisen die je aan beleidsonderzoek kunt stellen. Dat is spijtig: de WODC-affaire had beter onderzoek verdiend.

In this article in the series on the local democratic audit, the authors argue that municipal democracy in the Netherlands has become a multiple democracy. Within the formal framework of representative democracy, numerous democratic arrangements have emerged that may be referred to as participatory, direct and also what the authors call ‘do-democracy’. Additions to representative democracy did not come without reason: representative democracy is not a perfect system, either in theory or in practice. Efforts have been made to improve the functioning of representative democracy in a number of ways. Three of these are discussed in this article. The authors note that these three reforms do not solve the problems in representative democracy. So the Dutch municipalities have started looking for additions to representative democracy. In this article various forms of participatory, do-it-yourself and direct democracy are discussed. Many effects of these reforms are still unknown and knowledge about them has crumbled, but one conclusion can be drawn: people with a low education are not inclined to take part, even with arrangements that are easily accessible. Striving for a more vital local democracy seems meaningful; the authors formulate a number of ways of thinking about this.

In this article in the series on the local democratic audit, the authors discuss the relationship between decentralization, scaling-up and local democracy. Decentralizations and scaling-up operations have changed the face of local government in the Netherlands considerably in recent decades. What have the consequences for the functioning of local democracy been? Although decentralizations aim to increase democratic control of government tasks, decentralizations appear to have weakened local democracy in two ways. First of all, they have led to a substantial scaling-up of the local government, through municipal amalgamations and especially through the formation of regional partnerships. Regionalization in particular has had all kinds of negative consequences for the functioning of local democracy. Decentralization policy itself has also weakened the steering and controlling role of the city council – certainly in the short term – while decentralization presupposes that the city council has a strong role in coordinating decentralized policy with local wishes and circumstances. We can speak of a ‘double decentralization paradox’ that entails both bottlenecks and opportunities. From the legislator’s side, therefore, an integral vision for the organization of domestic governance is needed.