Incidents in organizations are inevitable. Sometimes these incidents get out of hand and reach the newspapers. But there are also incidents that are addressed in a timely and effective manner and do not escalate to become serious failures. Based on six concrete ‘near misses’ within the education sector, we have investigated how appropriate actions can prevent serious omissions and which mechanisms play a role in this.

Lack of safety leading to death or injury has many aspects: personal violence, traffic, accidents at home or the work place, not to mention other external sources as radiation and fine dust or internal sources like diseases. In this paper we restrict ourselves to the lack of safety in traffic as a system, and address the following questions: (1) Is traffic a system with one dominant responsible actor (Ministry of Traffic)? (2) What explanations are offered for the lack of safety? (3) Who is responsible for safety? (4) What sort of interventions are suitable for enhancing safety? and (5) What type of process/consultancy is most appropriate for answer the preceding questions?
The paper arrives at its conclusions via an indirect way, namely a short analysis of what a system comprises and what constitutes an explanation, responsibility and effectiveness. It appears that we are all causally involved in the lack of safety, and we are all responsible at all levels of society: micro-individual, meso-organizational and macro-societal. Therefore a promising route to maximize safety is a governance perspective comprising multiple stakeholder co-responsibility. It remains to be seen whether this perspective should replace the predominant command and control governance or complement it.

This article analyses a cause for the abundance of disproportional risk policies in the Netherlands. Many policymakers and academics believe that people in the Netherlands today are so risk averse that they are not willing to accept any risk that may result from reasonable risk policies. However, as some examples that we present show, there appears to be another kind of Dutch citizen: a citizen that understands and supports the decision of authorities that increase the risk to citizens but are necessary from the perspective of the common good. We argue that the belief in the unreasonable citizen is informed by one-sided research that only asks citizens how they perceive risks and what they want as risk consumers. Asking the same respondents face-to-face what they would do as policymakers themselves, however, results in diametric answers that show a rational and social side of those respondents. Respondents give higher priority to the education system or traffic safety than to preventing unusual risks such as asbestos or terrorism to themselves. Hence, the justification of reasonable risk policies is not as difficult as generally assumed.

This paper analyses various landmark criminal cases in the Netherlands that saw individual professionals being blamed for allegedly contributing to safety-critical events occurring in the past twenty years. These cases can be seen as symbolizing an increasingly risk-averse society whose expectations of human capacity for securing safety have reached unprecedented levels. In this view, punishing professionals who make dangerous mistakes serves to re-establish the illusion of being in control and to satisfy emotions. In practice, however, the prosecution of professional error appears to be somewhat out of touch with public sentiment, as responses to the cases discussed revealed little public support and a backlash among professionals. Moreover, safety science and practice claim that punishing individual error tends to undermine safety and overemphasizes the role of individual error compared to systemic failures. This begs the question of whether criminal liability should be imposed at the system level, as recently happened when local governments were sentenced following fatalities on dangerous road spots. Sentencing ‘system administrators’ may have advantages, but probably produces negative effects as well. Therefore, it would be ideal if administrators reduced the need for resorting to criminal law by proactively and generously taking responsibility for their organisation’s share in accidents.

Since the start of the 21^st century, most nations have followed the lead of the World Health Organization and developed specific policies to tackle the ‘global obesity epidemic’. The medical reasoning is that non-contagious diseases are the most important causes of mortality and morbidity, especially in prosperous nations. As these diseases are conceptualized as ‘caused’ by ‘unhealthy lifestyle choices’, there is dire need for preventive lifestyle policies that help people make ‘the healthy choice’. Seen from this perspective the distribution of responsibilities between governments and their citizens is made in accordance to the ‘intervention ladder’, which has been developed from a stewardship model.
Regarding the ‘obesity epidemic’, this contribution tests the basic medical claims behind this science policy complex. We find that the knowledge base for these claims is highly uncertain and that interventions lack efficacy. Furthermore, research points to increased levels of stigmatization of ‘fat people’, leading more discrimination. All this changes the status of the policies from preventive (i.e. proportionate) to precautionary (i.e. disproportionate). Further analysis of the preventive medical and policy paradigms shows both are by default biased towards precaution. Combined with the notion that citizens of democratic societies are entitled to trustworthy and transparent information, this contribution concludes that a reorientation of both paradigms is called for.

De digitalisering van de samenleving heeft verschillende gevolgen voor de overheid en overheidsbeleid. Eén daarvan heeft betrekking op de manier waarop beleidsanalyse kan worden gebruikt. In deze bijdrage worden de mogelijkheden van meer adaptieve vormen van beleidsanalyse verkend, waarbij beleidsvoerders stap voor stap en op basis van informatie uit het beleidsproces proberen meer over de beleidsuitvoering te leren. Die vorm van beleidsanalyse, die op een aantal punten afwijkt van eerdere vormen, heeft gevolgen voor de organisatie van de overheid maar ook voor de wijze waarop het toezicht moet worden ingericht. Dat levert interessante vragen en spanningen op voor de ‘digitale’ overheid.

This essay describes how municipal councillors can make the difference in the multiple democracy, in which forms of representative and participative democracy touch upon each other. The essay has three parts. The first part addresses the questions: what do you make politics of, and how do you fill in your role as municipal councillor in this multiple democracy? The second part is about the question: where to steer and control in the local interplay? The final part of the essay discusses what forms there are and at what moments they can be used. The key argument of the authors is that municipal councillors can make the difference by: (a) working on social assignments and connecting to these social assignments the administrative and organizational assignment by setting priorities; (b) being responsible for the whole system (for the community and for the municipality); (c) steering on a democratic process on the basis of clear criteria; (d) ensuring appropriate forms per assignment and per policy phase; and (e) thereby also supervising implementation and management.

The introduction of dualistic administration in the municipal government in the Netherlands in 2002 created the profession of the registrar. This article contains a description of the way Dutch municipal registrars fill in their office nowadays. The research shows that registrars deal with a wide range of tasks, that can be divided in four task fields: secretarial tasks, facilitating, representing and advising councillors. In the filling in of these task fields several profiles of registrars arise. So the basic registrar mainly organizes council meetings and reports on these meetings. The basic registrar plus performs the same tasks, but is also active in a few other task fields. The strategic advisor is the most active on all task fields. There are some significant differences between the three profiles when it comes to the importance of registrars to their activities, their value orientations and their competences. Contextual factors are hardly important, except the size of the municipality. It is also remarkable that the registrar has shown little activity with respect to two developments that are becoming increasingly important for municipal councils: regionalization and socialization of local government.

There is a lot of criticism on the profile descriptions in which Dutch municipalities express the requirements which they put on a new mayor to be appointed. They would look too much like each other and contain few real choices. This article describes the requirements Dutch municipalities put on candidate mayors and analyses the discriminatory power of profile descriptions. A content analysis of 231 profile descriptions and talks with five focus groups show that municipal councils especially ask for integer networkers and linkers, who are above all effective, empathic and communicative. The differences between municipalities in this respect are small and the municipal size hardly makes any difference. Municipal councils do not fully utilize the opportunities in profile descriptions for local customization and barely translate the local conditions into specific requirements. The explanation for this is partly located in isomorphic processes, that lead to uniformity: municipal councils follow the guide of the national government for the appointment process and copy texts from each other. At the same time the office of the mayor in the Netherlands asks for a specific content, that is translated into the profile descriptions. It is therefore the question if the criticism on profile descriptions is fully justified. They do have discriminatory power, although municipal councils could make much sharper choices in what they expect from a mayor, appropriate to the challenges the municipality faces.

Exactly a hundred years ago Jos van der Grinten wrote an article in De Beiaard (a catholic magazine) with which he established his name as early administrative scientist. In this respect he is an important ally of Gerrit van Poelje, who is generally recognized to be the founder of the (local) administrative sciences in the Netherlands. This essay discusses the most important themes in the work of Van der Grinten against the background of the early debate about the quality of local administration in the Netherlands. The essay also looks into his place in the history of (local) administrative sciences, not only nationally in relation to Gerrit van Poelje, but also internationally in relation to the American writer Frank Goodnow. In 1923 Van der Grinten (until his early death in 1932) was the first professor of State and Administrative Law at the new Catholic University of Nijmegen. As the city secretary of Nijmegen he played an important role at the arrival of this university to Nijmegen, but in this period he also contributed to the (local) administrative sciences. In this sense he is the forerunner of Public Administration, first at the Legal Department and later at the Social Department of the Radboud University in Nijmegen.

In administrative practice as well as in administrative science administrative innovation is a much desired good. In this article the author makes an attempt to describe the good, or the better, that can be pursued with administrative innovation, much sharper than has been done in the past. The result is a substantive framework for qualifying and evaluating administrative innovations. The article arises from a special interaction research, that started with a question from administrative practice (about the leading principles for administrative innovation in the Dutch municipality of Breda) and ended in a confrontation between desiderata from administrative practice on the one hand and foundations from administrative science on the other hand. Finally, these six leading principles emerged out of the investigation: responsiveness, productivity, involvement, counter-pressure, creativity, and good governance. The author also discusses how the resulting framework can be used and understood. The framework is robust because it not only is theoretically (the literature on governance and democratic innovation) inspired and founded, but also recognizable and manageable for administrative practice.