In practice, diversity interventions do not always appear to be effective. One argument is that there is little or no match between the perspectives of public organizations on diversity and the interventions used. This article provides an overview of the underlying rationales for diversity policy and discusses the perspectives on diversity from the diversity literature, HRM, and management literature and how these overlap, complement each other and differ from each other. What these perspectives have in common is that they all emphasize the added value of diversity. In the diversity literature, the emphasis is on the four perspectives equality, legitimacy, creativity, and the labour market. HRM literature focusses on managing differences. In public administration, there is a shift from active representation by individuals to connecting by all employees. Furthermore, the binding perspective is gaining more and more importance in the public domain because it may be possible to close the gap between the government and its citizen. This perspective emphasizes the importance of the long-term relationship with citizens to strengthen the trust of citizens in the government for realizing social tasks and responsibilities. It makes diversity an issue for all employees. For Hassan and Havva, and also for Hans and Hanna.

This article analyses the transformations of the Dutch civil service over the last 15 years, during which numerous cutbacks and reorganizations took place. While existing research predominantly focused on changes in the total number of civil servants, we examine how the distribution of civil servants changed in terms of rank, gender and age. We theorize four methods for shrinking the government apparatus, and for each method, we identify the possible consequences for the composition of the central civil service in terms of hierarchical make-up and of age. Our results indicate that the total number of civil servants only slightly decreased, but the decrease affected differentially the various ranks of the civil service. While at the lower ranks the number of civil servants decreased strongly, at the upper ranks the number actually increased slightly. The number of women in the civil service increased, also in the higher echelons. Regarding the age distribution, we found considerable changes, with the modal age shifting upwards with up to ten years. Altogether, the civil service has become slightly smaller, more gender-balanced, and significantly more senior (both in terms of ranks and age). The results of this study show that it is important for researchers and practitioners to look beyond the trends in the total number of civil servants and explore the deeper changes within the civil service.

The first contribution to this special issue on local democracy in the Netherlands is the inaugural speech of Job Cohen (the former mayor of Amsterdam) held on January 9th 2015 at the University of Leiden as extraordinary professor at the prestigious Thorbecke-chair. His field is the theory of the municipality as an administrative, political and legal system. The title of his inaugural speech was ‘The fourth D’, in which the first three D’s stand for three different decentralizations of tasks to the Dutch municipalities and the fourth D for democracy. In his speech Cohen advocates a deliberative form of democracy, because it doesn’t emphasize differences and the exaggeration of differences, but emphasizes what the members of a community have in common. Deliberative democracy wants to create space for this common interest through the establishment of an arena for dialogue. Job Cohen is particularly taken by the ideas of the Belgian writer David Van Reybrouck about lottery selection and citizen participation and corresponding initiatives like G1000: a civic-summit, a form of deliberative democracy that generates new ideas, opens new perspectives and increases trust in the democratic process. The element of lottery selection (that was previously put on the agenda by the American professor James Fishkin) is essential for these results, because it creates a maximum of diversity and real involvement of all layers of the population: full citizen participation.

The focus of the diversity policy in the Dutch public sector has moved during the past decennia. In the eighties offering equal chances for the different target groups was the central policy goal, after the millennium this became the effective and efficient management of a diverse work force in order to arrive at a better performing public sector, also called the business case of diversity. This article investigates the question how far the Dutch cabinet has influenced the diversity policy of public organizations. The answer to the question is that there was limited influence from the Dutch cabinet on the arguments for diversity of public organizations, but there was greater influence on the diversity interventions, especially in three sectors: central government, municipalities and police. This influence on interventions of other (‘fellow’) governments is caused by the strong steering of the cabinet. The interventions undertaken therefore reflect to a more limited extent the business case of diversity and remain stuck in the old target group policy. However, public organizations with a longer history in diversity policy, that operate closer to society and see the necessity for diversity, are more inclined to embrace the business case and start interventions that are related to this new approach.

‘Green gas’ is a sustainable alternative to natural gas. It is produced by converting biomass into biogas, which can consequently be upgraded to natural gas standards. Expectations about green gas are high. According to the long term vision of Netbeheer Nederland, the representative association of gas grid operators, green gas will entail 50 percent of the domestic gas mixture by 2050. In line with this vision national government has adopted a green gas innovation support program. Production of green gas takes place in rural areas with abundant supply of organic production resources, especially manure. It is in demonstration projects that green gas niche development is to be proven. In this paper the central question is how green gas demonstration projects manifest at the local level. By conducting a stakeholder analysis, we take a ‘bottom-up’ research approach, which helps us to identify organizational and institutional barriers key local stakeholders have in relation to green gas demonstration projects. We judge this necessary to further understanding in green gas niche development. The results of the analysis are used to advice policymakers about design and use of policy instruments which can help to solve these barriers.

Cities and regions have long captured the imagination of sociologists, economists, and urbanists. From Alfred Marshall to Robert Park and Jane Jacobs, cities have been seen as cauldrons of diversity and difference and as fonts for creativity and innovation. Yet until recently, social scientists concerned with regional growth and development have focused mainly on the role of firms in cities, and particularly on how these firms make location decisions and to what extent they concentrate together in agglomerations or clusters. This short article summarizes recent advances in our thinking about cities and communities, and does so particularly in light of themes advanced in my recently published book, The Rise of the Creative Class, which focuses on diversity and creativity as basic drivers of innovation and regional and national growth. This line of work further suggests the need for some conceptual refocusing and broadening to account for the location decisions of people as opposed to those of firms as sources of regional and national economic growth. In doing so, this article hopes to spur wider commentary and debate on the critical functions of cities and regions in 21st century creative capitalism.

Putnam (2007) claims that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods, residents of all ethnic groups tend to ‘hunker down’. Solidarity and trust are lower, mutual help and cooperation rarer, friends fewer. Various studies in the United States found a clear correlation between diversity and cohesion, and also for many different dimensions of social cohesion. Whether this finding also holds in other (European) settings is the subject of hot and unresolved debate. Specifically, this article addresses the question whether living in an ethnically diverse setting has negative consequences for social cohesion in the Netherlands as well. To further the debate, this article pulls apart various contexts and various dimensions of social cohesion. This article examines the relationship between ethnic diversity (in socio-graphically defined neighbourhoods) and four dimensions of social cohesion (trust, informal help, voluntary work and neighbourhood contacts) for the 50 largest cities in the Netherlands. We conclude that the Putnam hypothesis holds only to a limited extent in the Dutch context. The only aspect on which ethnic diversity has a negative effect is the degree of contact in the neighbourhood.

Since 1994, the concept of citizenship is a central concept in Dutch Integration policy for immigrants and their descendants. Gradually, the concept has become a moral category of good and active citizenship, associated with all kinds of obligations. Since the turn of the century it is even used to urge on – especially – Muslims to assimilate to mainstream culture and fundamental norms and values. This contrasts sharply with the Dutch multicultural policy of the 1980s. How is it possible for political and policy discourse to change in such a radical way within a few decades? And what role played the concept of citizenship in these changes? This article seeks to answer these questions by investigating how the concept of citizenship has been interpreted and applied differently over time in Dutch discourse on integration policy, focussing on issues of unity versus ethno-cultural diversity. With this purpose, first, the concept of citizenship is defined and differentiated in four dimensions and various perspectives. Next, Dutch political and policy discourse of the last 25 years is examined in broad lines. Subsequently, the Dutch discourse is analysed in more detail in debates of the last decades on dual nationality and on civic integration policy.

In public debate on immigrants' political ties with their country of origin, two assumptions prevail. The first assumption is that many immigrants engage in transnational political activities. The second is that forms of transnational citizenship are an impediment for the development of local citizenship. However, so far little research has been done on the importance of, and the relationship between, local and transnational citizenship. In this article, we focus on local and transnational forms of active citizenship, here understood as the total of political practices and processes of identification. Our study, conducted among middle-class immigrants in Rotterdam, indicates that the importance of active transnational citizenship should not be overstated. Among these middle-class immigrants, political practices are primarily focused on the local level; political practices directed to the home country appear to be quite rare. If we look at processes of identification, we see that a majority of the middle-class immigrants have a strong urban identity. Many of them combine this local identification with feelings of belonging with people in their home country. These local and transnational identifications seem to reinforce, rather than impede, each other.

The Netherlands has a well-developed, internationally unique system of expert advice founded in law. In addition to being instrumental for problem solving, advisory bodies are assigned tasks in mid- and long-term strategy formulation, putting new issues on the agenda, and organizing countervailing powers and checks and balances in national policy formulation. A decade ago, the number of advisory bodies was drastically reduced. Present cabinet policy pursues a second round of slimming advisory infrastructure. Through political centralization of demand for advice, and a further reduction in the number and diversity of advisory bodies, serviceable and instrumental expert advice for policy is prioritized. In times of new wicked problems for governance, there is a serious threat of erosion of expert policy advice as countervailing power. Does the present cabinet suffer from 'anorexia consulta'?

Although 'integration with retention of "own" culture' has ceased to be the dominant policy principle in Dutch minority policies for quite some time now, there are still remarkably many ethnically specific policy arrangements in the Netherlands. To explain this contradiction this paper introduces an administrative mechanism: the logic of making policy categories conflicts with the logic of policy implementation. The use of 'avoidant categories' – a particular type of policy category discussed in this paper – creates an administrative opportunity structure that unintendedly promotes ethnic fragmentation instead of integration in policy implementation. We illustrate the working of this mechanism in a comparative perspective; the Netherlands is not unique in this respect and experience in other countries is instructive.