The concept of self-reliant citizens reflects an ideology of citizenship that is multiple and flexible. It could be regarded as a ‘plastic’ word, malleable and adjustable according to convictions, needs and purposes. This study shows the importance of considering the way in which ideological views on citizenship are transferred, adjusted and enacted in an organizational context. On the basis of a case study at the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA), we contribute to knowledge on the way processes of framing interrelate on micro, meso and macro levels. We found that frames on self-reliance are enacted in a way that tensions and dilemmas are neutralized or reduced. In a dynamic context of conflicting goals and limited resources, DTCA-employees create meanings of self-reliance which legitimate practices and policies. By doing this they reproduce both organizational and social perspectives. Accounts of citizenship play an important role in this process. Self-reliant citizens are presented as active and responsible. The need of help is imagined as a normal and yet an atypical situation. This study promotes attention to the possibility that organizational systems reproduce perspectives in a way that alternative views remain unnoticed, whereas organizational choices are silently accepted as natural facts.

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 the Netherlands, as in many other countries, housing supply fails to meet the rapidly increasing housing demand in already densely urbanised areas, contributing to rising housing prices and possibly gentrification. The state and local governments aim to satisfy this demand by densifying urban areas and by transforming urban brownfields and vacant office parks into residential areas, thus containing urban sprawl. However, the private actors needed to redevelop these areas operate according to a different institutional logic and discourse: the market. According to this market logic, urban transform is too expensive, even when partly subsidized, and, to some extent, sprawl is unavoidable to satisfy housing demand. The two different logics fail to deliver the housing needed. Building discourse coalitions is suggested as a possible way out of this deadlocked debate, while government actors might also aim to influence the housing market with novel, market oriented policy instruments.

Societal and technological developments (such as the digital and energy revolutions) move faster than existing institutions can keep up with. The developments may lead to a metaphorical institutional void, which brings questions about the nature of the void, the changing rules, practices and responsibilities, and about the strategies to deal with the void. The concept has been around for a while but (again) seems relevant to understand current socio-technological innovations and challenges, that also allow us to further conceptualise the institutional void. In this introduction to the issue, we discuss the concept of an institutional void and explore how it is used in various domains of study, including public administration. We argue for how the concept is relevant today and therein also introduce the topics that are discussed in this special issue.

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.

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.

Do energy cooperatives work together with municipalities in the area of energy and, if this is so, how can this cooperative relationship be interpreted from a public administration perspective? That is the central question of this article. The experiences with cooperation of four frontrunners amongst the energy cooperatives show that in many areas a fruitful cooperative relationship has been developed. In other areas cooperation is lacking because the municipality stands aloof as soon as the energy cooperative provides services to citizens and/or companies or because the purchase of green energy by the municipality from their own energy cooperative cannot simply be carried out. In the development of renewable energy projects it also suits municipalities to be reluctant because they not only promote local renewable energy but are also responsible for the spatial quality. From the perspective of public administration it is striking that the variety of municipal roles increases the complexity of cooperative relationship with energy cooperatives. For energy cooperatives it is difficult to understand that the municipality sometimes behaves like an ally, but can also be reluctant. The variety of the bond between both parties is first of all apparent from the need of an own identity and autonomy in the energy cooperatives. Secondly, two of the four energy cooperatives that were analysed needed support in a financial emergency.

Local authorities know for some time from experience with partnerships with local communities in the area of sustainable development that the urgency of climate change increases and that citizens develop into an equal partner. The convergence of these two motivations asks for an innovative way of acting, in which the performance of local authorities is a crucial factor for the ultimate success of local sustainable energy projects in which citizens are actively involved or will be involved. This article exposes the ways in which local authorities innovate with policy for the support of active citizenship in the production of locally generated sustainable energy. The article also explores the barriers that arise. The authors analyse two cases on different levels of government; ‘The Energy-workplace’ (in the Dutch province Fryslân) and ‘The Armhoede sustainable energy landscape’ (in the Dutch municipality Lochem). The cases show that policy innovations crystallize as well at ‘arm’s length’ distance as in the direct sphere of influence of the (local) authority. However, innovation takes place by the grace of the space in the existing institutional framework and the political (and administrative) system. Formal guidelines (like policy or regulation), persons, and informal practices of the traditional policy implementation may hinder a productive interaction between (active) citizens and government.

This special issue contains five articles based on empirical research into energy transition at the local level. The focus is on the role of local authorities in the energy transition and on partnerships between local authorities (municipalities, provinces, regions) and local communities in the area of sustainable development. The three guest editors have also written an introduction and conclusion for this special issue.

In polycentric urban regions one can find different, mutually related cities without a clear centre. In these regions cities cooperate to attract inhabitants and employment, but at the same time they are each other’s competitors. The Randstad (Netherlands) and the Rhine-Ruhr area (Germany) both can be seen as polycentric regions. The authors explore to what extent these regions possess a common identity and common agenda and to what extent this promotes the sustainability and energy transition of these regions. In both regions identity appears to have grown especially at subregional level, by historically developed spatial-economic profiles of the different cities or suburban regions. In addition the cities in these regions more and more wish to distinguish themselves in the area of sustainability. Every city wants to be the smartest, greenest and healthiest, and to be at the forefront in energy transition and climate mitigation. In the Dutch Randstad this competitive drive especially seems to contribute to the realization of sustainability projects at the local level. And that is exactly why regional cooperation is important: to allocate resources as well as possible and to avoid transfer to others. This can be improved by the development of subregional or regional sustainability visions.

For this article, part of a series on the future of the discipline in the Netherlands, the author has talked to ten newly appointed professors in the field of public administration. We discussed their background, how they see their role and position within university and society and how they view recent developments in our field of study and our discipline. The young professors share their view on how our discipline could and should develop and what their role will be in this process.

Science and practice are largely agreed on the importance of interorganizational cooperation in the approach of tackling complex societal problems. Organization transcending innovation through this type of cooperation however appears to be complicated. Based on an analysis of the literature about partnerships, the authors distinguish three challenges: coping with the tension between old and new accountability structures, building good working relationships and developing capabilities for problem-oriented working. Starting from these insights they designed action research into problem-oriented partnerships in the safety domain (safety chain). Their main question was: what is the most important obstacle for innovation through problem-oriented interorganizational cooperation? Over a period of nine months, they watched eight teams of professionals from different organizations. Their task was to develop and implement innovative approaches to tackle persistent organized crime. Although all three challenges identified in the literature indeed played a prominent role, problem diagnosis and problem definition appeared to be the main obstacle for the teams. In this article the authors describe the action research and explore, on the basis of the results and the literature, how partnerships could cope in practice with the challenge of problem definition and problem analysis. They conclude the article with suggestions for the design of a follow-up round of the action research.

Big data can be seen as vital fuel for the innovation of diverse processes in both companies and in government policies and practices. In this short article we describe local efforts in the region around the Dutch city of Alkmaar in which the (local) government, (local) companies and a nearby university (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) work together on data-related challenges in a typical triple-helix structure. The municipality of Alkmaar gathers activities in a physical location to stimulate interaction and cooperation among (potential) partners, and it engages in the formation of new governance structures to increase both the intensity and the regional spread of the activities around data. All this raises many new and interesting issues and challenges for public administration researchers and practitioners.

Given the scientific and social importance attached to productive interactions between science and policy practices, there is a striking lack of insight into current knowledge practices and the dilemmas they lead to. Our special issue can’t solve this deficiency but it can provide an impetus for opening up current knowledge practices, reflect on the role of science in them and instigate a more systematic exchange of methods. A warning is given for the reification of boundary work and Gabrielle Bammers’ Implementation and Integration Sciences is introduced as framework for the analyses.

When scientific values like objectivity, validity and reliability are inadequate for designing research that enables society’s capacity for dealing with unstructured problems, which values or criteria should we use for designing adequate knowledge practices? Based on the articles in this special issue we answer this question by analysing the methods researchers have used for selecting stakeholders, knowledges, synthesis, context and outcome in new knowledge practices. Although a common language for comparison and documentation is lacking, the analysis provides recommendations for better designing interaction between scientific and other practices. The most important message however is that we need a designated platform for exchanging and evaluating experiences and discussing methods and the outcomes they yield.

As long as the existence of public administration, there is discussion whether public administration should focus on practice or mainly be a purely scientific field. Opinions of public administration scholars are divided on the matter. Moreover, the question is whether public administration is a discipline in itself or part of other disciplines such as political science, law or the management sciences. This article shows how public administration scholars see the discipline and the developments therein, based on a survey among scholars. Dutch public administration scholars are compared with their European colleagues. There are major differences between the Netherlands and the rest of Europe with regard to the status of the discipline. Firstly, as a separate discipline, public administration in the Netherlands is more important in comparison with other European countries. In the rest of Europe, in particular political sciences play an important role. Secondly, regarding the tension within the discipline, the public administration in the Netherlands is developing less towards practitioners than public administration in other European countries.

In this closing article we summarize the results of the individual articles of this themed issue and draw common lessons. With regard to cities as living labs, we conclude that three challenges need more attention: (1) unclear or contradictory goals and expectations, (2) organizational confusion, and (3) the lack of institutional links. Based on these, we offer a number of recommendations for research and practice in public administration.

Over the last couple of decades, metropolitan areas around the world have been engaged in a multitude of initiatives aimed at upgrading urban infrastructure and services, in an effort to create better environmental, social and economic conditions and to enhance cities’ attractiveness and competitiveness. Reflecting these developments, many new categories of ‘cities’ have entered the policy discourse: ‘sustainable cities’; ‘green cities’; ‘digital cities’; ‘intelligent cities’; ‘smart cities’; ‘information cities’; ‘knowledge cities’; ‘resilient cities’; ‘eco-cities’; ‘low carbon cities’; ‘liveable cities’; and even combinations, such as ‘low carbon eco-cities’ and ‘ubiquitous eco-cities’. Each of these terms apparently seeks to capture and conceptualize key aspects of ongoing urban sustainability efforts. Closer examination, however, reveals that the terms are often used interchangeably by policy makers, planners and developers alike. In this article we examine the reflection of the wider policy debate in academic discourse. By subjecting the twelve most frequently encountered categories mentioned above to bibliometric analysis, we aim to identify the distinct conceptual perspectives harbored by each of them.