We study the role division between public and private actors in their search for sustainable innovation of industrial clusters. This search unfolds as a two-phase process. In the first phase, private parties develop different projects for sustainable innovation independently from each other. Without coordination, a common ground for the projects emerges. Through their involvement in several of these projects, public actors are able to take up a central place between the projects and their associated actor coalitions. From this position, they are able to act on the common ground, and mobilize other actors for collaboration. The common ground is translated to a vision, and the private projects are assembled into a program, in which synergetic connections between the different projects are established. This starts the second phase of the process, in which a regional collaboration unfolds, coordinated by the public actors. Thus, the crucial role of private actors is to create the building blocks for sustainable innovation in the early stages of the process. The public actors are crucial in acting on these private initiatives, assembling the building blocks into programmatic effort towards sustainable innovation of industrial clusters. The main strength of public actors lies in their betweenness centrality.

This article shows how the municipality of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) has coped with the popularity of home sharing platform Airbnb. In collaboration with Airbnb, the municipality of Amsterdam was the first to come up with regulations for home sharing. However, enforcement of these rules proved difficult without access to user data of the Airbnb platform. In addition, a scientific (statistical) assessment of the effects of homesharing is also difficult without open data. As a result, the legitimacy of the platform has weakened in the eyes of some stakeholders. The article ends with some general reflections how government can cope with sharing economy platform. In particular, it is argued that the right-to-challenge principle may prove hard to apply to sharing platforms.

Transparency is a token of modern governance and is said to serve many different goals. Earlier research has shown that the disclosure of information will only be seen by the public and serve its goals if ‘transparators’, such as news media, pay attention to the information. The news media cannot be expected to be uncritical implementers of transparency policies; they will only do so when the policy and ensuing story fit their criteria for newsworthiness. This paper analyzes when and how news media pay attention to different types of policies serving different types of goals. It does so on the basis of quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 8 important cases of transparency-policies in the Netherlands in the past decade. The analysis shows that, even for these high profile cases, the amount of media attention for disclosed information is limited. The analysis also suggests that the media primarily tend to treat items in neutral or critical frames. Particularly in cases where the disclosed information is about the government itself, media stories seem to be primarily negative. These results suggest, in line with prior research, that transparency-policies may easily fail to be effective.

What do Public Administration scholars tell Public Administration students in the Netherlands about the study of Public Administration as science, public administration as empirical domain and how it works? By means of interpretative and historicizing research I studied student handbooks and historical reviews on the origination myth and self-image of Public Administration.
It shows a very delineated origin myth and a mainly non-political and neutral self-image. Therefore I conclude that Public Administration mostly neglects its political-normative foundations, which deliver problems in how and what Public Administration scholars teach. This article shows the importance of the political-normative foundations and includes a plea for Public Administration as true political science.

Infrastructure and adjacent areas represent extensive social value. However, infrastructure and areas are still often developed sectoral and independent. In the Netherlands, national spatial policies strive for combining infrastructure and area as one integrated approach as this is expected to result in more spatial quality. Taking this perspective, this article discusses trendy concepts in current Dutch planning, such as: adaptive planning, public and private cooperation and challenge-oriented approaches (‘opgave-gericht werken’ which focuses less on realising a project but more on the current and future issues and challenges in an area). This article argues that these concepts are closely related. Adaptive planning defines the rules of the game and the playing field, within which cooperation may develop. Cooperation is a means for creating spatial quality in interaction within this playing field. After all, generated quality can be considered as a contribution to the specific objectives and interest of the various partners. A challenge-oriented approach is the process for generating spatial quality from synergies in combined infrastructure and spatial development. This article aims to explore the relationships between adaptive planning, public and private cooperation and challenge-oriented approaches and to provide starting points for further research and discussion.

According to various authors, Dutch local autonomy is under pressure. Because of the many tasks transferred to municipalities, local authorities hardly have time for their own tasks and initiatives. Local autonomy requires that local administrators have sufficient time, attention, and money. In this article, the concept of local autonomy is discussed, as well as why local autonomy is under pressure and who is responsible for (a sufficient amount of) local autonomy. In general, local autonomy is the responsibility of both national as well as local politicians and administrators, but on both levels, there is still much room for improvement.

This contribution contains a summary and a conclusion of the special issue ‘Innovation and government: a bad marriage or a fertile relation’. Innovation is said to be not the core quality of government. However, we found that government is actually good in innovation, albeit not in an obvious way. Government has a complex position when it comes to innovation. Sometimes innovation may be seen as a public value. However, innovation usually also involves conflict with other public values that civilians expect government to secure. This the innovation dilemma is that government ought to be both favour and innovation and fight its negative consequences to other public values. The four contributions show how governments deal with this dilemma. They first move along with the innovation and then redefine their positions by for instance developing new instruments, bundling private initiatives or framing private initiatives to large programmes.

In the private sector, user innovation is used to develop innovations that better fit the needs of customers. In the public sector, interest for citizen innovation is also on the rise and new information and communication technologies seem to offer a great potential for accessing the power of citizens. At the same time these technologies offer another potential value: they can turn citizens into data sources. This data can offer governments crucial insights and may form the basis for datadriven innovation. Innovating with citizens in both different ways seems to offer great potential for broadly supported issues such as urban sustainability. This article develops a framework for studying these new developments and presents explorative research in three cities (Curitiba, Glasgow en Utrecht). The research shows that cities make different choices in their use of new technologies to innovate with or for citizens.

In The Netherlands an innovative water safety policy is under development: multi-layered safety. This innovation is a move from a preventive approach (levees) towards a risk approach. Mitigation of consequences for spatial measures and disaster management too are considered in reducing flood risks. The theory of path dependence teaches us that many technical, financial and institutional factors keep the current policy system in its equilibrium. This complicates policy innovations. This article contains a case study that explains how pilots contribute to a process of policy innovation. It concludes that enshrining results in the ‘home organizations’ and synchronizing pilots with running policy processes is essential. The pilots also show that policy renewal concerns a process of ‘muddling through intelligently’.

For aldermen in Dutch municipalities, ‘integrity’ increasingly seems to be an important factor causing their downfall. A lot of aldermen have resigned in the recent years because of ‘integrity’ and invariably local and national media were actively involved in this process. This article deals with the question of the role of the media in integrity affairs involving aldermen that have to resign. To answer this question, the authors analysed ten affairs that occurred in 2014 in which an alderman had to resigned (forced or voluntarily) because of integrity issues. The analysis shows that local media, regardless of how small they may be and how limited their means, often report extensively about integrity issues. In some cases, local media even act as accountability forums that call these aldermen to account. In other cases, the coverage in local media leads to further questions and calls for political accountability in the municipal council. Sometimes the media ‘merely’ report on the debates between the municipal council and the municipal board, but by doing so magnify the impact of an affair in the local community. In this way, the media fulfil their democratic role as watchdogs of local democracy, a role in which they bark loudly, often persistently and sometimes venomously about (alleged) integrity affairs.

This essay contains a short history of the municipal and other administrative sciences in the Netherlands. This history is divided into seven lives. Each life has its own specific characteristics and approaches. The story starts in 1914 with the dissertation of Gerrit van Poelje and the aldermanship of Floor Wibaut (for the Dutch Labour Party) in Amsterdam. Nevertheless, the authors make a plea to view 1921 as the actual starting point, because it is the year of the introduction to municipal administration written by Van Poelje and the first Dutch academic magazine on municipal administration (‘Gemeentebestuur’). This means that we can prepare for the celebration of 100 years of (municipal) administrative sciences in 2021. A great challenge for all universities, but certainly for the Public Administration programme of the University of Twente, which is now celebrating its 40^th anniversary. The challenge is to work on current topics such as the relationship between public administration and technology in smart, sustainable and resilient cities.

This year we are celebrating volume 70 of the Dutch magazine ‘Bestuurswetenschappen’ (Administrative Sciences in English). The first complete volume was published in 1947, but the first issue had already appeared in November 1946, so last month our magazine had its 70^th anniversary. It is an appropriate age to reflect for a moment on the launch of our magazine in this anniversary issue, because 70 is rapidly becoming the new 65. It is also an opportunity for us to pay respect in this editorial to those people who were involved at the launch of the magazine which happened under difficult circumstances (because of the consequences of the Second World War and the huge task of rebuilding the Netherlands). At the same time this homage is an impressive ‘who’s who’ of Dutch (and also partly the international) administrative sciences at that time, with many remarkable and influential characters playing a role. Apart from all the male authors and editors, one woman (Hermine Revers) was the editorial secretary of the magazine. Chief editor was Gerrit van Poelje, who is considered by many to be the founder of Public Administration in the Netherlands.

In recent years, attention has increasingly been focussing on the quality of local democracy. Through the transfer of central government tasks to the municipalities, the importance of local government for citizens in the Netherlands has increased. This also places higher demands on the way local democracy functions. For various reasons, it is not easy to meet these demands. The debate on the quality of local democracy can be reduced to two basic questions: what is local and what is democracy? Instead of answering these questions, the authors of the article (editors of this new series) demonstrate what knowledge is needed to do this. They outline broadly the agenda for a local democratic audit, for which this article is an introduction. After a short theoretical discussion of the importance of local democracy, the authors point out those knowledge gaps that still exist in their opinion. They do so on the basis of current research. After identifying the key relations in local democracy, they present an agenda for further research.

Is local democracy in the Netherlands equipped for its mission? There is confusion and disagreement about the answer to this question. How people assess existing democratic practices is strongly influenced by one of the three main perspectives: representative democracy, participative (deliberative) democracy or ‘do-democracy’ (associative democracy). But to be able to have this discussion in the first place, empirical knowledge is required about the state of democracy at the local level. In this article (apart from the introduction, the first in a series on the local democratic audit) the authors bring together the available research data and organize these data with the help of David Easton’s system model: from input of citizens and civil society via throughput to output and finally feedback again in the political system. The research presented offers some insight in the state of local democracy, although it is not possible to give a final assessment. That depends on the perspective on democracy chosen, but it is also not possible because of the fragmented and incomplete nature of the research on local democracy in the Netherlands. The authors advocate contributing to these discussions with more empirical knowledge. The overview in this article shows that there is work to be done in this respect.