We analyze how ‘original’ residents in different gentrifying working class areas in Amsterdam North experience and evaluate the changes in their neighborhood in terms of social cohesion – in other words, whether they feel at home in their changing neighborhood and whether they feel connected to other residents. Policy interventions often focus on establishing connections between residents with different socioeconomic or cultural backgrounds, in order to stimulate mutual understanding. An underlying policy aim is to uplift vulnerable original residents through contact with higher income groups. Based on our empirical data, we critically assess the concept of ‘bridging capital’ (Putnam, 2000) that underpins several of the social activities that are organized in areas such as the ones in our study. Subsequently, we discuss the importance of ‘bonding capital’ or the sense of interconnectedness and strong ties amongst original residents. Our empirical data – based on both interviews and participatory observation – suggest that activities within the ‘own’ community contribute importantly to feelings of belonging in the neighborhood. In the final section of the article, we discuss how different types of local meeting places offer opportunities for ‘lighter’ forms of interactions without aiming directly at strong connections between differently positioned neighborhood residents.

Access to affordable, decent and secure housing is under increasing pressure in countries across the world, especially in burgeoning cities. This results in displacement, exclusion and increasing housing cost burdens. This theme issue consists of a collection of papers that approach inequality on urban housing markets from different angles. In this introduction to the special issue, we provide a framework to understand these various dimensions of inequality and their interconnectedness. We identify three scales of inequality: First, at the abstract level of housing systems, market developments and housing policies contribute to increasing housing costs and a reduction in affordable housing units. Second, at the urban level we identify increasing spatial segregation between populations as well as the intertwined trends of intensifying gentrification and suburbanization of poverty. Third, at the everyday level we can identify a loss of belonging among long-term residents of changing (gentrifying) neighbourhoods, while other residents may appreciate change. This also fosters the potential for conflict and poses new challenges to professionals dealing with families in situations of poverty. We argue that emerging inequalities at these different scales need to be considered as interconnected.

Since the 1970s social integration of the police has been considered as a key element of the Dutch police. It can be understood as a strategy to realise police legitimacy. This article adresses the question whether the Dutch police still strive for police legitimacy via social integration. The article is based on a series of interviews with present and former strategic leaders of the Dutch police. The study shows how asking about police legitimacy and social integration of the police leads to more fundamental considerations about the role of the police in democratic society and about democratic values and the rule of law (‘Rechtsstaat’). The article concludes that police leaders emphasize the importance of civic liberties (freedom of speech, right to demonstrate) and equal rights. Police leaders consider the role of the police to reinforce and protect these values. In their opinion, this requires the police to be deeply rooted in society.

Evaluations of EU legislation can fulfill a key role in the European policy process. They can provide the knowledge base required for political accountability towards the electorate, and form a basis for the improvement of existing legislation. This article introduces a research agenda in the realm of the ex-post evaluation of EU legislation, which comprises two research lines. The first strand comprises research into ex post legislative evaluations conducted by the European Commission. This research is innovative, because EU policy researchers so far have barely touched upon evaluation, as a final and important stage in the EU policy cycle. By assessing evaluation critically, we can ascertain to what extent the EU’s ex-post evaluation system is more than an instrument, aimed at increasing the EU’s legitimacy. The second research strand is own evaluation research, focusing on the role of European administrative networks- intergovernmental structures that have been established to improve the implementation of EU legislation by the member states. By critically evaluating the functioning and effectiveness of these networks, I hope to be able to find out whether and under what conditions these network structures are more, than the sum of their national parts.

With her chair in urban development management, Ellen van Bueren investigates policy, governance and management issues. Cities, as economic and cultural centres in our society, are major consumers of resources. They not only contribute to problems such as climate change, but also experience the risks and consequences thereof. Technological solutions to these problems are difficult to implement. They require larger-scale system changes, or encounter resistance. Making cities sustainable not only requires technical solutions, but also institutional innovation. A socio-technical-ecological system approach to cities shows the coherence and complexity of issues. Issues play on multiple scales, are cross-sectoral, and require an interaction of citizens, companies, and governments. Moreover, the playing field between these groups of actors is changing rapidly, technological empowerment in particular has made the citizen a much more equal player alongside the government and business. Existing instruments and approaches are not sufficient to approach sustainability issues. To identify and address these issues, cooperation between science and society is necessary. Multi- and transdisciplinary learning environments enable researchers and students to identify issues, to answer questions and to try out solutions together with stakeholders. Such environments are indispensable for the development of sustainable cities.

Increasing demands and competing values force public organizations to introduce new organizational forms that veer away from rigid bureaucratic structures while remaining in control. How do public managers and their employees deal with the dilemmas that these decentralized and organic ways of organizing entail? On the one hand it must be prevented that public managers fall back too quickly on structures that rely on control and formalization, while, on the other hand, they themselves as managers are still primarily held accountable based on those bureaucratic principles. New organizational forms also assume that leadership is shared and distributed. This not only asks for a higher degree of self-management of employees, but also requires from formal leaders that such behavior is supported and encouraged. In our research and teaching on these changes in public organizations, we work closely with practice. That too is a matter of balancing, this time of public engagement with scientific independence.

This article presents the research program into governance in a knowledge society of professor Albert Meijer and colleagues at Utrecht University. The knowledge society is a society in which (1) citizens are higher educated that ever before and their level of education largely determines their societal position, (2) knowledge plays a key role in administrative and policy processes and is increasingly contested and (3) technology plays a key role in every facet of societal life. Research into governance of and in the knowledge society requires a transdisciplinary and plural approach to scientific work. Transdisciplinarity entails combining insights from science with various forms of contextual and practical knowledge. A plural approach to scientific works means that we should not only do explanatory empirical work but also theoretical, normative and prescriptive research. The overall ambition of this research program is to contribute to a democratic debate about the governance of the future.

The future is inherently uncertain. No certain statements can be made about the future. This means that policy and management always have to deal with long-term ‘future uncertainty’. However, it does matter how we name uncertainty; what words we use for it. What kind of uncertainty do we mean when we talk about uncertainty in policy processes and management? The same applies to the type of preparation for uncertainty that we choose. The question ‘are we prepared’ can also be answered in different ways. In this contribution we identify a variety of types of uncertainty and types of ways of dealing with uncertainty, based on the text of my Inaugural Speech delivered in 2016. I then discuss how these questions have been translated into research and education and which next steps I foresee for myself in the – although inherently uncertain – near future.

Public Administration as a scientific discipline can increase its scientific and social relevance if it takes a more design-oriented approach. With that I go back to the classical notion of Herbert Simon that public administration is a design science. I advocate revitalizing that idea. This is necessary if we look at the problems governments are struggling with, but also in view of the developments in the environment of our field. But it is also promising because it offers opportunities to achieve innovative, scientific knowledge. The design sciences contain numerous insights into how a public administration design process can be set up, with room for creativity, abduction and intuition. I divide a public design process into five rounds: the round of understanding the issue, defining or demarcating it, coming up with possible solutions, testing and refining these solutions and distilling the more generically applicable elements. This is ideally done through fast, iterative rounds of developing, testing and refining designs. In such a design process, disciplinary knowledge can play an important role in understanding the issue and coming up with possible designs. And so designing can also become a way to validate this knowledge.

For a long time, the three governance structures market, hierarchy, and community were regarded as separate entities. The market is based on the price mechanism, the authority mechanism is the basis of the hierarchy, and trust relations characterize the community. As the knowledge economy evolves, there is a shift in thinking about how these governance structures are related. Creating and sharing knowledge are key features of the knowledge economy. However, this knowledge is partly tacit and sharing knowledge is particularly useful among diverse organizations, which are two barriers for sharing of knowledge among organizations.
A new stream of literature suggests that the ability of organizations to combine the three governance structures contributes to their capacity to share knowledge with other organizations. Based on this literature, this article shows what kinds of organizational forms are possible. Besides that, it offer empirical example of the conditions under which these organizational forms evolve as well as how they contribute to organizational innovation.

Changing behavior is often necessary to tackle societal problems. Governments can change behavior via economic incentives (such as subsidies for electric cars), bans/mandates (such as prison sentences for drug smuggling), communication (for example information campaigns) and nudges (for example, being a donor by default). However, the government should not be a manipulator that applies the latest behavioral tricks without societal support. Public administration research shows that support cannot be taken for granted. If there is no support for behavioral change, well-intended interventions can even be counterproductive. I therefore develop a model for supported behavioral change. I provide five criteria that indicate when there is supported behavioral change: if the behavioral change is both effective (1) and efficient (2), and when there is support for behavioral change among politicians (3), among implementing organizations (4), and among citizens (5).

In this article in the series on the local democratic audit, the authors discuss the relationship between decentralization, scaling-up and local democracy. Decentralizations and scaling-up operations have changed the face of local government in the Netherlands considerably in recent decades. What have the consequences for the functioning of local democracy been? Although decentralizations aim to increase democratic control of government tasks, decentralizations appear to have weakened local democracy in two ways. First of all, they have led to a substantial scaling-up of the local government, through municipal amalgamations and especially through the formation of regional partnerships. Regionalization in particular has had all kinds of negative consequences for the functioning of local democracy. Decentralization policy itself has also weakened the steering and controlling role of the city council – certainly in the short term – while decentralization presupposes that the city council has a strong role in coordinating decentralized policy with local wishes and circumstances. We can speak of a ‘double decentralization paradox’ that entails both bottlenecks and opportunities. From the legislator’s side, therefore, an integral vision for the organization of domestic governance is needed.

Governance is a human activity and is therefore unquestionably about relationships. Relationships between public and private parties. Relationships in existing steering-oriented structures (the political administrator as guardian, magistrate) and also relationships in new forms of cooperation that are often focused on good relationships (government participation). Public-private partnerships are inevitably accompanied by conflicting interests that place different demands on interactions. One-size-fits-all does not fit there, but customization is required, with constant alignment with what is – and what is not (yet). And so the ability to make contact requires much more attention, and from there to explore and grasp perspectives. How do you work on the tensions that you find on your way? It is there that the method of communication influences how the process of cooperation and steering proceeds. This is not a matter of whether-or, but and-and. Both perspectives are characterized by a different relationship with those involved and a different way of contact and interaction. This article focuses on contact from a collaborative perspective. The classical administrative side already has a rich history, while the cooperation side is often still an unknown and unexplored territory. The central question is: how can you, as a director and public professional, deliver tailor-made solutions and therefore adapt to complex tasks? The authors look at complex situations from a communicative perspective and they introduce ‘appreciative communication’ as the art of aligning with what really moves people, as a frame of view of the inconvenience caused by the differences present. They highlight a number of generic tensions that can arise in cooperation situations. A case study into the approach to regional innovation in the field of mobility serves as an illustration.

In the implementation of the Dutch Youth Act, since the so-called ‘transition’ of 2015 under the responsibility of the municipalities, there are three major problems: the municipalities are short of money, the implementation of youth aid is accompanied by high administrative burdens and there are serious quality concerns, especially where different care providers must work together for one client. This article deals with the possibilities of the economic transaction cost theory for realizing improvements through organizing more effective collaboration between municipalities and healthcare providers. Transactions are a ‘forgotten’ cost source. There are three sources of transaction costs: limited rationality, opportunistic behavior and ‘asset specificity.’ In this article the authors analyze twelve problems documented in the literature on youth care from this perspective. This creates a framework from which municipalities can tackle these problems in order to improve the quality of youth care, to keep costs under control and to reduce the administrative burden. In a number of sectors and large projects ‘linking zones’ appear to be a way to increase the trust between players in a chain, so that transaction costs fall. Where poor cooperation between chain partners in youth care is a major cause of the problems, municipalities can make significant gains by establishing linking zones with care providers contracted by them. This article outlines the method in a linking zone.

Singapore and the Netherlands are small, export- and trade-dependent countries that perform excellently in many areas, such as good governance and integrity, policy effectiveness, liveability, innovation, and e-government. At the same time there are clear differences in political culture and history: Singapore has a more authoritarian governance style including limitations in press freedom, freedom of speech, and political activism. Within these contrasting contexts, both countries have introduced and implemented similar public management reforms since the 1990s. The aim of these reforms is to maintain public service excellence in a dynamic environment but the countries make contrasting choices in achieving this aim. This article describes how administrative excellence is organised and pursued in Singapore and identifies five lessons for the Netherlands: (1) Use positive narratives about government often; (2) be nuanced about capping top-level remuneration; (3) enhance the attractiveness of government as an employer; (4) invest in life-long learning; (5) be an authoritative expert amidst horizontalisation hypes.

South Africa underwent an unprecedented transition in 1994. The country changed from the Apartheid regime into a system founded on the principles of the rule of law and equal treatment for all. Along with this political regime change, a wide range of social rights were included in the Constitution, which grants al citizens a constitutional right to a wide range of social services. Moreover, the system of governance and organisation of services was designed according to the latest insights from the then emerging new public management paradigm. Now, twenty years later, the system is crumbling; many of the basic services are not properly provided to citizens. Partly, this is a consequence of a basic absence of integrity in parts of the political class and in elements of the civil service. However, as we illustrate in a case analysis of the Water Boards in the Western Cape Province, the problem is also a consequence of the design of the system of governance. The combination of unlimited constitutional access to services and a stringent regime of new public management principles in the organisation of service provision has led to a serious crisis of performance. Therefore, the solution for the problem may be to redesign the system according to other governance principles, such as learning governance and networked governance.

In the past years, Flemish municipalities have been confronted with a plethora of new public management reforms. The two probably most salient reforms include the introduction of a strategic planning system entitled the policy and management cycle (PMC) as well as the provision of financial incentives for municipalities that undertake a merger. These reforms are not unique to the Flemish context. Indeed, similar reforms took place in the Netherlands, where policy and management instruments (PMI) – a strategic planning system – were introduced in the eighties and municipal mergers have been part of the political agenda for several decades. But similar reforms also took place in, for instance, the United Kingdom (i.e. the best value regime in 1999) as well as Denmark (i.e. the municipal mergers in 2007). In this essay, these Flemish reforms are critically evaluated, taking into account following question: which public values are triggered through these reforms, and what might this imply for the Flemish and Dutch local public sector? This essay uses new public governance principles such as strategic thinking and the learning organisation to answer this question.

In international comparative research, a dominant image often emerges of Denmark as a frontrunner in innovative governance, gaining top results in international rankings.
Based on four recent examples of national public reforms, this article studies the dynamics of reform implementation in Denmark, which can be characterised as expeditious and efficient. Three explanatory factors are discussed: a political, systemic and managerial factor. What is Denmark, a country in many ways similar to the Netherlands, doing differently? The article concludes that, for the Netherlands, the guiding element of Danish public reforms can be found not in the results of these reforms, but in the efficiency with which they are implemented.