This article explores how we can gain insight into the quality of local government with the help of the public value perspective. The public value perspective does not evaluate government through generalised standards or benchmarks, but through the judgments of the actors involved in the policy. This approach could do better justice to the unique context of different governments, such as different local governments. The public value perspective, however, is hampered by the competing expectations that actors have of public policy and their generally negative bias towards the government. Based on 71 interviews with local actors in six municipalities, we show how the public value approach does indeed yields many different and critical perspectives, even within municipalities that are considered successful by national experts. However, we also show which connections exist between these seemingly competing perspectives and how sombre judgments about past governance are actually influenced by optimistic ambitions for the future.

Forty years ago, Dutch Public Administration started as an independent academic discipline. The founding fathers considered empirical application and multidisciplinarity the most important characteristics of public administration. This article assesses the current state of the discipline in the Netherlands. The assessment is the result of a series of five debates throughout the country, focussing on different elements of the Public Administration discipline: education, academic research, consultancy and policy advice. In brief, the article argues that the discipline has reached maturity in these forty years. It has become an accepted academic discipline, on the verge of a mono-discipline. The Netherlands is considered as one of the leading countries in public administration research. However, these successes also create a gap between public administration as a successful academic discipline and its roots as a multi-disciplinary, applied science. Renewing the balance between these two will be the main challenge for the decades to come.

This paper reviews developments in political-administrative relations in Dutch central government from 2002-2012. It highlights the strengths/weaknesses of Dutch structures and processes in managing the interface between ministers and the public service. It signals a number of key trends in the political context of executive government that are going to put pressure on the status quo, and examines the much more centralised and politically orchestrated Australian system for pointers towards possible ways in which these contextual changes are going to be.

A large number of Dutch policy areas is governed by institutionalized European policy networks and European laws and rules. Various forms of multi-level governance have emerged that were seemingly unforeseen at the time when the field of European integration studies was preoccupied by the fierce debates between intergouvernmentalists and supernationalists. Nevertheless, the field has hitherto given little attention to how europeanisation has affected national civil service systems. This article kicks off this special issue with an overview of the recent literature on the effects of Europeanisation on national civil service systems.