Citizen participation is a regular feature of recent legislation and policymaking. However, more often than not, the goals of participation remain implicit. As a consequence, exclusion mechanisms well known from the literature keep coming back. A current example is the Dutch Environment and Planning Act, which is expected to enter into force in 2021. In this article we use this Act to identify the exclusion mechanisms at work and suggest an alternative wording.

In Nederland komen tal van wicked problems (WP) voor. Ze worden ook wel aangeduid als weerbarstige problemen. Kenmerkend is het unieke karakter, het feit dat kennis over probleemaspecten beperkt is en verschillende perspectieven op een probleem en meerdere waardenoriëntaties een rol spelen. Naast cognitieve en normatieve complexiteit bestaat er ook nog sociale complexiteit. WPs zoals voetbalvandalisme spelen zich af in een beleidsnetwerk met tal van elkaar afhankelijke actoren. Kennis, preferenties, handelingsvermogen en middelen blijken gespreid en niet in de hand van één actor. Om toch tot een bevredigend resultaat te komen moeten de actoren gezamenlijk optrekken. Daarom is interorganisationeel netwerkmanagement en deliberatie met burgers een wenselijke responsestrategie. Bij WPs zijn actoren dus tot elkaar veroordeeld. Centralistische besluitvorming werkt niet. Een centrale actor kan overigens nog wel een rol vervullen als initiator, facilitator of regisseur van overleg en discussie; als arbiter bij botsende perspectieven; of beslisser na netwerkberaad en inbreng van burgers.

In 2015, Dutch local governments have become responsible for youth care, social welfare, employment and income assistance programs, as a result of decentralization. Many municipalities have set up service delivery networks and community teams, in which they collaborate with healthcare providers and civic organizations to build integrated care services. It is assumed that these networks will improve outcomes in terms of enhanced people’s self-reliance and healthcare cost control; by operating close to citizens they are in a position to know the client, activate a client’s social network and mobilize specialized professional expertise if necessary. However, a comparative case study of 26 emerging local networks in the Arnhem area indicates that healthcare providers use the networks mainly for presentation purposes in an effort to secure business continuity, that the role of local governments is fuzzy, and that citizen participation only thrives when actively encouraged in a climate of trust.

Studies of second-order elections using aggregate data have predominantly focused on examining the extent to which European parliament elections and regional elections are dominated by the national, first-order arena, and paid scarce attention to the analysis of municipal elections. In addition the study of second-order elections is dominated by looking at the impact of first-order factors whilst ignoring the impact of arena-specific factors. This article addresses these shortcomings by analyzing the impact of national and local factors on the performance of national parties in the Dutch municipal elections of 2010. Our analysis shows that there are significant effects of local factors. Most parties lose votes when having been in local government and in some cases as well when having in addition lost an alderman as a result of a political crisis. Parties also lose vote share as a result of the entrance of new national and local parties in a local election, with the effect of new national entrants being larger than that of new local entrants. Our analysis corroborates earlier findings that point to a dominance of national factors, while at the same time showing that it is vital to include local, arena specific factors in order to get to a better estimation of the second-orderness of non-national elections. We discuss our results with respect to the recurring debate about the nationalisation of the Dutch municipal elections.

Concerns about mobile phone masts are often put down as unfounded fears of health risks. However, our ethnographic study of mast siting controversies shows that citizens mostly want to be democratically involved in the siting decisions. There is no room for such engagement in the national antenna policy, thus, citizens shift their attention to the possibility of health risks. The national government responds to this with more research and risk communication. However, the centrality of science leads to a shift in the discussion towards the credibility of science. Even a Klankbordgroep (Sounding Board) with all stakeholders fails to change the focus. This article shows that local conflicts are not so much the result of individual concerns, which is the subject of many social sciences studies, but are the outcome of a dynamic interaction between governments, citizens and scientists. Governments should not frame a local issue only in terms of a scientific problem.

This special issue focusses on deliberative elements in deciding over wicked problems. We present four case studies in which some form of deliberation was organized: the placement of mobile phone masts, hydraulic fracturing for shale gas, the failed HPV vaccination campaign and climate dialogues organized to enhance deliberative knowledge production over climate change. The case studies demonstrate how each of the deliberative processes has become politicized and that deliberative governance runs the risk of turning into a technocratic policy approach.

In this feature authors discuss recent research findings that are of interest to readers of Beleid en Maatschappij.

In this feature authors discuss recent research findings that are of interest to readers of Beleid en Maatschappij.

In this feature authors discuss recent research findings that are of interest to readers of Beleid en Maatschappij.

This paper deals with the electoral and political consequences of urban region formation. The electoral geography of new political parties differs substantially from that of traditional ones. New parties are mainly successful in different parts of urban regions. The declining traditional parties have rather a regional pattern, although some of them show new spatial patterns too. These developments are interpreted in the context of the cleavage theory, in which old and new cleavages are linked with a different spatiality. Following the Anglo-Saxon literature an increasing process of polarisation is hypothesised between the welfare state orientated city and a neo-conservative and neo-liberal suburban fringe. This article examines and proofs the existence of these processes in the urban region of Brussels by means of individual-level and ecological electoral data.