Social media changes society and causes new dilemmas in local government. Little is known about the nature of these conflicts and the way government organizations deal with them. Therefore the authors of this article have carried out empirical research into the manner in which police officers deal with value conflicts concerning the use of social media. Their research shows that the well-known conflicts in the literature between effectiveness and efficiency and between effectiveness and legality were also dominant in this case, but that many more conflicts than are known from other studies concerned transparency and participation. In addition they discovered that the bias strategy was often used, which suggests that a conservative response is preferable in a situation with a lot of dynamics. In this way the research shows how government officials deal with the tension between a stable organization and a dynamic environment and look for appropriate forms of coping at this specific interface. The authors stress in their recommendations that the further strengthening of the learning ability of organizations deserves attention: not just to find the right way to deal with value conflicts, but to be able to find new ways to deal with the new conflicts that arise.

This article is about local referenda in the Netherlands. Based on extensive empirical research the authors make clear how the local referendum in the Dutch democracy has developed not only in time and practice, but also how we can interpret the referendum theoretically. They show how in scientific literature, but also in practice, they are still looking for the meaning of the local referendum for Dutch local democracy. The authors also show that the practice of Dutch local referenda is searching, varied and in continuous development. Since 1906 193 local referenda are organized in the Netherlands. By far most referenda took place after the nineties of the last century. Local referenda are a local democratic ‘domain’, that will be explored in the Netherlands in the coming years. Last year a lot of attention has been given to the (local) referendum in the domain of legislation. The process of legislation has not been finished yet. The authors believe this offers an unique opportunity to share the available knowledge and experience about referenda and debate the adequate filling in and anchoring of the (local) referendum. This is a task for scientists, administrators and politicians alike.

Reflection and Debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

In the public as well as the semi-public sector numerous codes of good governance have been written. Although theses codes clearly lay down which public values must be the foundation of our administration, our newspapers often show examples of bad governance. It is striking that these codes mostly just picture an ideal, but do not give insight in tough considerations. In this article the authors show that different public values mentioned in codes are all worth pursuing as such, but that they in practice collide with each other. The manner in which administrators, managers and executives cope with such dilemmas, determines public opinion on good governance. Two cases have been researched: a municipality and a hospital. Through a Q-research six value patterns are demonstrated to exist in these cases. In addition (through interviews) the authors have discovered which values exactly collide in the cases, and which strategies are used to cope with collisions of values.

In the Chronicle of a recent policy trend Gjalt de Graaf and Albert Meijer discuss how the new network society influences public administration by exploring a specific case of how citizens are aiming to bring their resigned mayor back in office by a social media campaign.

In this literature review we present and discuss the key concepts of this symposium issue: (good) governance, (public) values, and the management of tensions between public values. The article concludes with an overview of strategies on how to deal with public values as a prelude to the remainder of the symposium, and discusses the implications of the distinguished strategies for public administration practice.

In this introduction to the special issue of Bestuurskunde on Good Governance, we first introduce the central theme of this issue. We notice that many laudable values are usually included in codes of good governance, but that these values conflict in the context of public governance - conflicts that need to be managed. How this could be done and in which way values clash in (semi-)public organizations, is the main theme of this special issue