In this special issue, recent public sector reforms in South Africa, Denmark, Belgium, Mexico, Singapore and Denmark are analysed. Reforms in the public sector are by and large explained as a chronological development from traditional bureaucracy, via New Public Management to New Public Governance. This is also the way the many administrative reforms in the Dutch public sector are often explained.
The articles give insight in the administrative developments in these countries and their background. They also offer the opportunity to make comparisons with administrative developments in the Netherlands, and to draw lessons. The analyses show that the dominant explanation of reforms in the public sector (from traditional bureaucracy, to New Public Management to New Public Governance) is helpful in making sense of administrative developments, but they put this explanation into perspective too.
For the Dutch situation yet another insight came to light. We often complain that the Dutch processes are cumbersome, take long and involve many -if not all- stakeholders. A close reading of the contributions from abroad must inevitably change this pejorative view on our national sport: the cumbersome process provides valuable checks and balances, that will help to fight the drawbacks and risks that we have seen in the international cases.

Wicked problems ask for new, smart forms of governance beyond a singular focus on hierarchy, market or community. Based on the case studies presented in the individual articles of this special issue, this concluding article describes what smart governance could entail and discusses its strengths and weaknesses, both as a concept and a practical tool.

In the Netherlands, the Dutch government public private partnerships (PPP) using DBFMO contracts has become the default option for realizing complex public infrastructures. DBFMO contracts imply the integrated outsourcing of the design (D), building (B), financing (F), the maintenance (M), and also often the exploitation (O) of projects to private actors. The general idea is that by bundling public and private resources, the increasing complexity of today’s public infrastructure projects can be tackled more easily. However, reality is contumacious. As a consequence of several problems related to DBFMO collaborations, the Dutch highway and water management agency Rijkswaterstaat and several private actors recently put forward a new market vision. This vision is a call to reinvent the dominant collaboration practice between public and private actors: relational aspects should be central. In managing projects, more attention should be given to the quality of relations, attitudes, openness and trust. Recent research confirms that the success of DBFMO projects is not only contingent on contractual aspects but also, and maybe even more importantly, on relational aspects. Smart governance involves a shift from the current dominant financial economic-oriented contractual approach to PPP towards a more sociologically inspired relational form of governance.

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have attracted considerable attention in the Netherlands and Flanders, as witnessed by the recent wave of doctoral theses on this topic. This article presents a review of fourteen Dutch and Flemish doctoral theses, published in the period 2012-2015. The main purpose of the review was to examine what the theses’ most important findings and conclusions are. We found that they mainly focus on themes related to effectiveness, transaction costs, and legitimacy. However, although PPPs are often part of a debate between opponents and proponents, none of the studies found convincing arguments for or against the use of PPPs. Instead, most studies stressed the importance of contextual factors for the success of PPPs. The doctoral theses provided various valuable recommendations for practitioners regarding, e.g., the optimization of PPP procurement and the importance of soft management aspects such as collaborative working and process management. We observed that most theses studied PPPs by applying traditional theories and methods and that the majority focused on the early project phases of planning, procurement, and contracting. More research is needed into the later project phases. Finally, since the generalizability of the theses is limited, more programmatic, quantitative, and (international) comparative research is required.

We are only fully aware of our dependency on large scale technical infrastructure systems when they fail to provide reliable services. Yet, at the same time we have witnessed the dismantling of the organizations providing these services due to privatization and liberalization policies. In this article we provide insight into the complexity of managing these now networked systems, consisting of several private and public organizations, by looking at the Dutch railway system. More specifically we analyze a case in which the decision to take several railway tracks and switches out of service resulted in a large scale disruption during rush hour in one of the busiest parts of the Netherlands. With the concept of sensemaking we show that the different actors involved were unable to create a common understanding of the situation to enable coordinated action.

In the Netherlands citizens increasingly unite in cooperatives to realize common facilities and services in their neighborhood themselves. Apparently neither markets nor governments succeed in providing all the public goods and services that citizens strive for. Although these forms of self-organization are still young and their success is far from sure, they are seen as sources of social innovation and new ways of organizing that inspire many. Their example is followed widely: cooperatives seem to be rapidly emerging almost everywhere. Yet not much systemic knowledge is available on their nature, drivers, and impacts, nor on the conditions under which they flourish. In this special issue the state of the art regarding these cooperatives is examined in the areas of energy, care, broadband connections and housing. The various contributions show that the main challenge that cooperatives have to deal with is finding the balance between the ambition to preserve their identity as grass root organizations and the need for professionalization. Also they have to learn to build and maintain relationships with other organizations and actors in their environment on which they are dependent: governments, private parties and professionals.

Horizontal governance arrangements potentially conflict with the very principles of representative democracy and, likewise, with the existing political institutions. This conflict manifests itself in the interaction between representatives and the executive power: although the former have the formal power, the latter participates in horizontal networks and therefore has the resources that are necessary to form good policy. This erodes the power position of representatives. Frame work setting is commonly suggested as an arrangement for representatives to enhance their grip on policy processes in network-settings. The authors of this contribution examine the effects of frame setting as coupling mechanism between horizontal networks and vertical politics in six policy processes in a Dutch Province. Based on both theory and research findings they redefine the concept of framework setting in order to make it more attuned to the complex, interdependent and dynamic nature of policy-making in networks.

In December 2004, the report of the Dutch Parliamentary Investigation Committee on Infrastructural Projects was published. This committee investigated the budgets overruns of two large rail projects currently under construction in the Netherlands: the Betuwe Line and the High Speed Line (HSL)-South. The committee also looked at how mistakes that were made in the earlier projects had been avoided in the construction of the Zuiderzee Line, a project currently under preparation. The report provides a look inside the struggle of the Dutch national government from the beginning of the 1990s in their public-private partnership (PPP) efforts. In this contribution, we provide an analysis of the motives, approach and results of privatisation of these three projects on the bases of the detailed empirical analysis provided by the Committee. We seek explanations of how privatisation with these three projects evolved and what lessons can be drawn. It appears that practices have so far been far from good and instead of committing to the obligation to apply PPP in every large infrastructural project, the government should first find out how PPP in such projects should actually be carried out.