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.

De Operatie Inzicht in Kwaliteit van het kabinet-Rutte III moet leiden tot beter overheidsbeleid door de kennis over de doeltreffendheid en doelmatigheid te vergroten en het evaluatiestelsel te verbeteren. De Operatie moet een cultuuromslag realiseren, niet via verplichte voorschriften maar via intrinsieke betrokkenheid. Zo’n Operatie kost veel tijd en geld en kent een politiek risico. Zolang het uitgangspunt blijft dat effectiever overheidsbeleid te realiseren is door meer aandacht voor doelmatigheid en doeltreffendheid, is de kans op verbetering klein. De uitvoerbaarheid en aanvaardbaarheid van beleid in de praktijk blijven dan te veel uit het zicht, en daarmee ook de werkelijke effectiviteit van beleid. Het institutionaliseren van ook deze twee criteria via een vernieuwde Regeling Periodiek Evaluatieonderzoek (RPE) zal resulteren in beter beleid en politieke verantwoording. De cultuuromslag ontstaat vanzelf wanneer de vernieuwde RPE een vanzelfsprekende manier van werken wordt. Een cultuuromslag is wel degelijk te realiseren met een voorschrift. Eenvoudiger, sneller, goedkoper en met minder politiek risico.

In this article we draw several conclusions based on the individual contributions to our special issue. We do so by making eight statements that in our view should contribute to the discussion on societal discontent and political unease in the Netherlands.

The articles in this special issue try to shed some light on the rise of societal unease and political discontent in the Netherlands. It is often assumed that citizens are angry and can no longer identify with the actions undertaken by government. But is this really true? Who are these ‘angry citizens’ that everybody seems to be talking about? Do they really exist and what are they angry about? How to square the heated discussions about the angry citizen with research that shows that trust in government still is quite high in the Netherlands? How can we understand the motivations of societal discontent and how can government react to citizens reacting to its actions more emotionally than before?

Policy decisions taken now can determine the room for manoeuvre of future generations for a very long term. Politicians and civil servants often only seem to be interested in short-term implications, however. A major focus on the short term does not provide sufficient stability and impetus for long-term structural measures. This is primarily an institutional issue. In this article, the authors discuss how to instil a long-term focus in day-to-day processes of policymaking.

In this very personal narrative, Gabriël van den Brink analyses why many citizens seem to oppose change instigated by government. In his view, this is due to government and society elites embracing a paradigm of change which is based on an unrealistic view on modernity. He analyses what this means, what its effects are and proposes a new way to go forward.

In recent narratives about the negative mood of the Dutch, ‘societal unease’ and ‘angry citizens’ seem to be concepts that are directly linked: angry behaviour is the manifestation of deep feelings of unease. Is it that simple? In this contribution, I use the Citizens’ Outlook Barometer (COB) to investigate unease and anger, and their relationship. The spread of unease in today’s Netherlands is outlined quantitatively using indicators for strong societal pessimism and political discontent (a complex of negative attitudes towards national politics and globalization). The approach to anger is more exploratory. Anger is definitely not the most dominant feeling that pessimists are aware of, but their explanations of why the country is heading in the wrong direction do often reveal anger. Interviewing ‘angry citizens’ suggests that they are not ‘angry people’ in general, but that their anger is limited to politics and social issues, and is sometimes instrumental (‘you have to express yourself angrily to be heard’). This civic anger can be important both in addressing injustice in politics and as a source of action. It is better to approach anger as a topic in its own right rather than to frame it as an expression of unease.

Recently the authors, who all work at the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, published a paper in which they analysed contemporary literature and research on social discontent to clarify whether this current feeling of discontent is different to previous periods of discontent and how it might affect the functioning of the Dutch government. In addition, to strengthen their analysis they discussed its implications with local politicians, experts and practitioners. In this article, the authors reflect on the outcome of these discussions. Their dialogues revealed that there is a need to redefine the dialogue between administration and society. They distilled five lessons from these discussions: they argue that government should be more 1) reliable and credible, 2) responsive, 3) effective, 4) empathic and 5) cohesive.

Populism, terrorist attacks, global revolutions, threats against public figures, hate and fury on social media. All of this suggests that we appear to be living in an ‘age of anger’, as Pankaj Mishra calls it. Everyone is sometimes outraged or angry, but in these times we see permanent moods of anger and revenge raging. This makes classic questions current again: how should anger in the public domain be understood? Is it always inappropriate and should it be controlled and condemned under all circumstances? Or is anger necessary to highlight structural injustices and to force change? The justification of anger is very delicate.. In this article the author discusses these questions based on philosophical treatises of anger by Martha Nussbaum, Peter Sloterdijk, Slavoj Žižek and Pankaj Mishra.

Despite the praise for Richard Florida’s new book The new urban crisis, it remarkably can be seen as an ‘urban confession’ or even as a ‘public penance’ for everything he wrote before in his glorious publication The rise of the creative class. That book offered the opportunity to look at the city in a different way and to formulate approaches for new urban politics. As a child, Florida and his family fled the city with its crime and other problems and moved to a suburb. As a young intellectual, Florida returned to the city, where he became interested in the role of the creative class in the process of re-urbanization. During his academic research, he discovered the ‘magic formula’ that cities could flourish by stimulating this creative class. However, his belief in this magic formula has eroded and now, about fifteen years after his publication, he admits he was mistaken. What seemed a solution appeared to be the cause of ‘the new urban crisis’. In his new book, the ‘urban optimist’ is replaced by the ‘urban pessimist’. New policies are needed that replace the concept of ‘the-winner-takes-all’ by ‘urbanism-for-all’ to stop the so-called ‘patchwork metropolis’ of segregated neighborhoods.