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.

Theory about participation has long moved beyond merely informing citizens, arguing for more influential and effective instruments. Nevertheless, ‘inspraak’ remains widely implemented in Dutch practice, with mixed results. This article argues that the deliberative quality of the instrument is closely related to the performance of power. Dramaturgical concepts are employed to analyze resistance against the siting of a homeless facility in an Amsterdam neighborhood. One particular evening sets the stage for escalation, which ultimately frustrates the policy process. The analysis shows how the performance of the meeting invokes specific kinds of resistance. A different performance of ‘informing’ could potentially improve the quality of the public sphere.

The Dutch social care system was fundamentally reformed in 2015. A key policy aim was to activate citizens and their social networks, turning them from mere consumers into co-producers of care. The expectation was that, by doing so, public spending could be reduced and community engagement could be restored at the same time. Regulation was put in place to incentivize network support.
Whether this constitutes ‘smart governance’, however, depends on whether the variety of factors determining sustainable network support can be identified in the first place. At present, the new care policy is supposed to apply indiscriminately, and is as such not yet evidence based. In addition, flaws in the present budgetary and regulatory steering mechanisms need to be addressed. Potential users are not very familiar with the regulation in place for incentivizing network support, and the regulation is currently neutralized by law courts, unaware of the participatory relationship between care authorities and citizens as envisaged by the 2015 reform. Moreover, engaging networks is time-consuming and requires investments before returns can start to materialize. From a normative stance, network volunteers moreover ought to participate in decision-making, as they will be investing their private resources (such as time) instead of tax payers money. Effectiveness and legitimacy are thus two prerequisites for governance in the social domain to be genuinely ‘smart’.

To be able to realize the ambitions of citizen participation, diversity of participants is a crucial condition. At the same time excluding groups of citizens, amongst them critical citizens, is inextricably linked with citizen participation. In this article in the series ‘Local democratic audit’, the authors wonder what the exclusion of critical citizens means for the process and outcome of citizen participation. Through two empirical studies during a spatial intervention in different municipalities in the Netherlands, they investigated how people involved in a participation process spoke about critical citizens and their manifestations. The results show that the way these critical citizens are discussed either legitimizes exclusion or questions it critically. The legitimization of exclusion is detrimental to the support for spatial intervention. The problematization of exclusion results in a responsive approach to critical citizens, which is beneficial for both the course of the participation process and for the support for the spatial intervention.

Decades of neoliberalism have placed emphasis on individualism, self-responsibility, and self-interest. As a result solidarity, and charity are losing ground and inter-subjective suspicion enters society. With a dominant focus on the economic life, happiness can be found in working and consuming, which has led to a morbid focus on performance. As a consequence self-exploitation, stress, fear of failure and auto-aggression undermines self-love. Competing individuals, with whom man cannot identify himself, see the other as someone who also has to take care of himself; empathy for the stranger is far to seek. Problematic because in the participatory society people need to care for themselves, and others, which calls for public love. Economic actions of man should be perceived as a social activity that presupposes love. A supplier must show empathy towards its customer before a decent product can be created. A prerequisite for empathy and cooperation is equality. However with scarcity as the engine of hyper-capitalism market thinking inequality between people increases. It seems that men should embrace the ‘difference’ of others. The acceptance of ‘the strange’ could start with a heterogeneous student population during education, and a variety of inhabitants in neighbourhoods. Furthermore a more relaxed working climate with the focus on cooperation instead of competition could contribute to the return of empathy and self-love.

Lack of safety leading to death or injury has many aspects: personal violence, traffic, accidents at home or the work place, not to mention other external sources as radiation and fine dust or internal sources like diseases. In this paper we restrict ourselves to the lack of safety in traffic as a system, and address the following questions: (1) Is traffic a system with one dominant responsible actor (Ministry of Traffic)? (2) What explanations are offered for the lack of safety? (3) Who is responsible for safety? (4) What sort of interventions are suitable for enhancing safety? and (5) What type of process/consultancy is most appropriate for answer the preceding questions?
The paper arrives at its conclusions via an indirect way, namely a short analysis of what a system comprises and what constitutes an explanation, responsibility and effectiveness. It appears that we are all causally involved in the lack of safety, and we are all responsible at all levels of society: micro-individual, meso-organizational and macro-societal. Therefore a promising route to maximize safety is a governance perspective comprising multiple stakeholder co-responsibility. It remains to be seen whether this perspective should replace the predominant command and control governance or complement it.

Over the last three years, various G1000s have been organized in Dutch municipalities. These citizen summits share a number of characteristics: random selection of participants, an open agenda, dialogue and inclusion of the entire ‘system’ (inhabitants, politicians, civil servants). The G1000s aim to renew local democracy and to change the relations between citizens and governments. Both of these objectives affect the role of local councilors and this paper discusses their opinions and attitude towards a G1000. It shows that councilors regard the G1000 as complementary to representative democracy and that they want be involved both in the organization of a G1000 in their municipality and the follow-up in local decision-making. On the one hand, this may lead to a better coupling between citizen initiatives and formal policy making. On the other hand, this entails the risk that a G1000 becomes institutionalized and loses its distinctive characteristics that make it a new form of democracy.

This paper will show how citizens’ summits in the Netherlands cope with diversity of participants and the impact of this on those initiatives. This provides insight in why diversity is hard to reach and what can be done to improve it. Presently, dissatisfaction about the Dutch democratic system is widespread. Solutions are being sought to strengthen Dutch participatory democracy. For this objective, citizens’ summits develop different kind of initiatives. However, citizens participating in these summits are a homogeneous group, namely mainly white, middle aged and highly educated. Mechanisms of exclusion, selection of candidates, homogeneous composition of the organization, and a dominating intellectual/rational way of debating are playing a role here. Citizens with different backgrounds need to be included in these initiatives to obtain a better representation of society’s voices. This notion has been strengthened by theory, which shows that diversity enables more creativity and innovation.

In the private sector, user innovation is used to develop innovations that better fit the needs of customers. In the public sector, interest for citizen innovation is also on the rise and new information and communication technologies seem to offer a great potential for accessing the power of citizens. At the same time these technologies offer another potential value: they can turn citizens into data sources. This data can offer governments crucial insights and may form the basis for datadriven innovation. Innovating with citizens in both different ways seems to offer great potential for broadly supported issues such as urban sustainability. This article develops a framework for studying these new developments and presents explorative research in three cities (Curitiba, Glasgow en Utrecht). The research shows that cities make different choices in their use of new technologies to innovate with or for citizens.

In recent years, attention has increasingly been focussing on the quality of local democracy. Through the transfer of central government tasks to the municipalities, the importance of local government for citizens in the Netherlands has increased. This also places higher demands on the way local democracy functions. For various reasons, it is not easy to meet these demands. The debate on the quality of local democracy can be reduced to two basic questions: what is local and what is democracy? Instead of answering these questions, the authors of the article (editors of this new series) demonstrate what knowledge is needed to do this. They outline broadly the agenda for a local democratic audit, for which this article is an introduction. After a short theoretical discussion of the importance of local democracy, the authors point out those knowledge gaps that still exist in their opinion. They do so on the basis of current research. After identifying the key relations in local democracy, they present an agenda for further research.

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.

In imitation of the G1000 in Belgium in the Netherlands G1000-meetings were held in Amersfoort, Kruiskamp, Uden and Groningen and a citizens summit in Amsterdam with a similar design. In this article the authors investigate the design of these citizens summits and their contribution to a number of important democratic values. What is the diversity of the participants, the influence on policies and the quality of the discussions during the citizen summit? Their research shows that the diversity of the group of participants is rather limited. The selection method that is chosen, whether a lottery selection or an open invitation, doesn’t make much difference for the diversity of the group of participants. In addition the influence of citizens summits on policies and politics is nearly absent. The subjects that come forward at citizens summits hardly ever come back in the local policies, not even at the citizens summit in Uden, where the municipal council has taken the initiative to organize a G1000. Finally, in general the participants qualify the discussions at the table during citizens summits as constructive and inspiring. The specific form of the dialogue has only little influence on the extent to which the participants feel themselves heard and feel free to say whatever they want.

In his concluding remarks the chief editor (and also editor of this special issue) discusses shortly the desirability and feasibility of a global parliament of mayors as proposed by Benjamin Barber. On both points, according to him, the idea of a global parliament of mayors can be questioned. Concerning the desirability of the proposal there is no clarity about the underlying notion of democracy and about its contribution to the democratic goals it aims at. Concerning the feasibility of the proposal Bas Denters questions if Barbers high expectations of the blessings of advanced ICT tools, that will be used for a virtual debating platform, are that realistic. Crucial are also the financial and material resources which are needed for the organization and functioning of a global parliament of mayors.

According to the policy makers of the Dutch police the more complex society for years requires a police organization that can operate as a network player, or even network director, in ever increasing local safety networks to fulfil the police functions of criminal investigation and maintenance of public order in an effective manner. This claim hardly seems to validated by empirical evidence. Validation is important because research shows that a lot of time is spent on the police network function within community based policing. The question is if this time is spent in an effective manner. Therefore this article addresses the question of the revenues of the police network function within community based policing for the core tasks maintenance of political order and criminal investigation. Based on a policy analysis, interviews and five weeks of participatory research in one police force in the Netherlands, the authors conclude that the policy of the police is only to ‘take’ out and not ‘give’ to local safety networks, although according to the practice and the network literature networkers from the police should give to be able to achieve results. Because the police network function does contribute to the quality of life and the social safety in the community, the authors believe that the community is best served by police officers that have a broad network function.

The Dutch government aims at a participatory society, for example by striving for a larger amount of self-responsibility in providing social care, since the introduction of the Societal Support Law (in Dutch called ‘Wet maatschappelijke ondersteuning’ or in short Wmo). Does public opinion in the Netherlands reflect this change of mentality? This article investigates (a) how far public opinion on responsibility for social care for the elderly has changed between 2003 and 2010, (b) which factors explain why some people put most responsibility on the government and others on the family and (c) which factors explain intra-individual changes of attitude. This research has used survey data from the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (2003, 2006/07, 2010). A shift in public opinion appears to have taken place in line with government policy: less responsibility for the government and more for the family. However, a majority of the Dutch population still puts most responsibility on the government. Attitudes appear to be connected with normative motives rather than with utilitarian motives. Intra-individual changes in attitudes in the direction of less government responsibility are mainly explained by normative factors and not by factors related to self-interest.

Within the past two years, hydraulic fracturing for shale gas became a highly contested technology in the Netherlands. Possible negative environmental impacts are at strained terms with possible economic, energy and geo-political benefits. In addition, there are many scientific uncertainties about, for example water contamination, methane emissions, the amounts of gas to extract and the risk of earth quakes. Societal conflict and scientific uncertainties make fracking for shale gas a wicked problem for decision makers. This article demonstrates that the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs has implemented several instruments for deliberation, such as a consultation round with stakeholders and a sound board for an independent research. These failed to lead to the desired support for fracking. In this contribution, I demonstrate that these instruments led to reason giving but not to structuring of the problem. They were used by governmental actors and protest groups as a political platform that was fuel for the political conflict.

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 review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Beleid en Maatschappij.