Since 2001, the Dutch province of Overijssel has had its own knowledge centre focusing on urban society, called the ‘KennisInstituut Stedelijke Samenleving’ (KISS), alongside national knowledge centres. This essay gives an overview of some relevant KISS meetings devoted to a many kinds of citizen participation. The overview is based on reports made by the author himself. Examples of citizen participation are: the new styles of neighbourhood governance, citizen participation through neighbourhood budgets, the strength of the city and location-based leadership, innovative urban renewal and the promotion of citizen initiatives in the province of Overijssel. Examples are not only from the province of Overijssel (situated in the east of the Netherlands), but also from other parts of the Netherlands and other countries (Flanders, United Kingdom, United States and all over the world). The subject of citizen participation (in connection with urban renewal and administrative leadership) enjoys an ever-increasing popularity as is shown by the number of KISS meetings devoted to this subject.

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.

Given the scientific and social importance attached to productive interactions between science and policy practices, there is a striking lack of insight into current knowledge practices and the dilemmas they lead to. Our special issue can’t solve this deficiency but it can provide an impetus for opening up current knowledge practices, reflect on the role of science in them and instigate a more systematic exchange of methods. A warning is given for the reification of boundary work and Gabrielle Bammers’ Implementation and Integration Sciences is introduced as framework for the analyses.

A transition to a bio based economy requires social and technological innovations. Transition management theory holds that these innovations take place in niches that can bring about structural change in society, politics and the economy in a stepwise manner. However, these innovations are always subjected to systemic barriers, such as regulations and institutional structures, that need to be overcome. This was also the case in a consortium of government, industry and eco-toxicologists that collaboratively developed innovative water monitoring tools. In this contribution the authors investigate how systemic barriers can be made productive in a science-society dialogue by creating reflexivity and learning. They conducted a frame analysis of interviews and policy documents to unravel systemic barriers to innovation – in the form of discursive boundary work: the routinized demarcations of practices. Second, they experimented with a science-society dialogue to reflect on these routinized demarcations and develop alternatives to overcome these boundaries. The research demonstrates that reflective conversations occurred and that participants developed a boundary concept of ‘living water’ that enhanced their innovative collaboration and technology.

When scientific values like objectivity, validity and reliability are inadequate for designing research that enables society’s capacity for dealing with unstructured problems, which values or criteria should we use for designing adequate knowledge practices? Based on the articles in this special issue we answer this question by analysing the methods researchers have used for selecting stakeholders, knowledges, synthesis, context and outcome in new knowledge practices. Although a common language for comparison and documentation is lacking, the analysis provides recommendations for better designing interaction between scientific and other practices. The most important message however is that we need a designated platform for exchanging and evaluating experiences and discussing methods and the outcomes they yield.

Professional services such as educational services, are increasingly managed and optimized in order to improve performances. Performances of students, teachers and school (boards) are measured and evaluated. Increasingly, rules and systems focus on outputs and control. Consequently, the ‘freedom’ of professionals such as teachers is reduced, or is perceived and felt to be reduced. There have been growing debates on the problematic effects of performance pressures. Often, public professionals are seen as ‘defenseless victims’ of systems and pressures – they are ‘professionals under pressure’. In this paper, we introduce a more positive way of understanding professionals and professional action in changing contexts. We see professionals such as teachers as ‘active agents’ who can develop and regain control over their own situation. Professionals can deliver quality, in spite of bureaucratic burdens and managerial intrusions. We call this ability professional capability: ‘the ability to proactively deal with work-related expectations, tasks and burdens in dynamic stakeholder environments’. This paper combines research on public administration, organizational sociology and occupational psychology, to generate a more productive understanding of proactive coping of professionals in public domains. We define and operationalize professional capacity, we explore sources and effects, and we develop hypotheses for further research.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

In this article we explore how and under what circumstances present-past comparisons can be used to find solutions to current social issues. We argue that meaningful comparisons can not only be made between countries or groups within countries, rather, comparisons between current and past societies too can enrich our thinking about pressing social problems. We search for the conditions under which such comparisons are possible without undermining the professional skills, epistemological and methodological insights of the various disciplines. Learning from the past calls for an in-depth study of present problems and the historical (role) model alike, with historians and social and political scientists cooperating in teams. We propose a five-step-method: (1) diagnosing the social issue, (2) tracing comparable historical practices that might offer solutions, (3) distilling these practices from their historical contexts, (4) massaging the ‘historical’ practices into the diagnosed present-day context through an imaginative exercise, and (5) implementing these solutions into everyday life through forms of experiment.

Risks taken by some organizations may have considerable impact on society. In this contribution the assessment and management of risk are perceived to take place in a multi-actor setting. Within an organization operators, risk managers, and top managers interact about risk assessments and risk mitigation strategies. Public regulators and inspectorates increasingly focus on risk management systems instead of the operational activities or organizational outputs. Are organizations systematically assessing their risks? This contribution identifies two contrasting perspectives on risk assessment and risk mitigation in literature: risk management and risk governance. An empirical study in three sectors reveals evidence of both perspectives in practice. Companies adopt hybrid approaches, which are essential for the quality of risk assessment and mitigation. Indeed, adopting just one perspective seems dangerous. We conclude that public regulators and inspectorates might provide incentives to focus on just one perspective and suggest two heuristics for public inspectorates that respect hybrid approaches of risk assessment and mitigation.

De Handreiking Gezonde Gemeente, een landelijk instrument voor verbetering van integraal gemeentelijk gezondheidsbeleid, wordt volgens de Gezondheidsinspectie onvoldoende gebruikt. Deze studie onderzoekt mogelijkheden voor verbeterde implementatie van de handreiking in de GGD-organisatie.
Diverse GGD-disciplines, gemeenteambtenaren en externe respondenten zijn geïnterviewd over ervaringen en opvattingen aangaande de handreiking.
Naast een positieve inhoudelijke waardering is er een sterke roep om concrete vertaling naar het ‘hoe’ van het gebruik. De directe voordelen van het instrument voor betrokken professionals en managers binnen en buiten de GGD-en zijn onvoldoende geëxploreerd.
Als GGD-en het als taak zien om het gebruik van de handreiking door professionals, gemeenten en partners te stimuleren, dan zullen zij eerst de voordelen ervan moeten expliciteren. Bereidheid bij GGD-managers om professionals te sturen en faciliteren op het gebruik van instrumenten lijkt hiervoor een belangrijke randvoorwaarde.

Modern government has high expectations of active citizen participation. Sociologists however, expect that this emphasis on citizen participation leads to new inequalities between city neighbourhoods. In ‘better’ neighbourhoods relatively more inhabitants are higher educated and indigenous, categories that are traditionally more active in society. In vulnerable neighbourhoods on the other hand many of the inhabitants are non-indigenous, lower educated and unemployed, who – as is shown in research – participate less. Citizen initiatives therefore would prosper in neighbourhoods with resilient and competent citizens and a powerful social fabric, while inhabitants of the vulnerable neighbourhoods would participate less, although there is more need for active citizen participation, because of their problems. This study analyses active citizen participation in two neighbourhoods in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, ‘Schiemond’ and ‘Lloydkwartier’, a typical backward neighbourhood versus a typical neighbourhood for young urban professionals (‘yuppen’). In contrast with the expectations the inhabitants of Schiemond do not appear to participate less than the inhabitants of Lloydkwartier. Concerning matters of neighbourhood safety even more respondents participate in Schiemond than in Lloydkwartier. Possible reasons are: (a) that lower educated people do participate more often in informal neighbourhood initiatives; (b) that because of the average longer residency in Schiemond there is a greater amount of public familiarity in this neighbourhood; or (c) that because of the bigger problems in Schiemond there is a greater necessity for inhabitants to become active themselves.

Citizen participation is firmly on the agenda of many Western policy makers. Numerous opportunities for individuals to participate in public decision-making have been created. However, few citizens use these opportunities. Those who do are often the highly educated, white, middle and upper classes that also tend to dominate other democratic spaces. Opportunities to become active can increase inequalities in terms of whose voices are heard in public decision-making. This fundamentally challenges the central democratic value of equality. Nevertheless, others can represent the interests of those who remain silent. Using the concept of representative claim this paper explores a variety of forms of representation (electoral, formal non-electoral and informal self-appointed) in the domain of social policy which is currently decentralized in the Netherlands. We conclude that especially informal self-appointed representatives such as medical professionals, churches and patient organizations can potentially play an important role in representing groups who often remain unheard in the public debate. They can therefore play an important role in ensuring the democratic quality of the decentralization process.

In the Netherlands citizens increasingly unite in cooperatives to realize common facilities and services in their neighborhood themselves. Apparently neither markets nor governments succeed in providing all the public goods and services that citizens strive for. Although these forms of self-organization are still young and their success is far from sure, they are seen as sources of social innovation and new ways of organizing that inspire many. Their example is followed widely: cooperatives seem to be rapidly emerging almost everywhere. Yet not much systemic knowledge is available on their nature, drivers, and impacts, nor on the conditions under which they flourish. In this special issue the state of the art regarding these cooperatives is examined in the areas of energy, care, broadband connections and housing. The various contributions show that the main challenge that cooperatives have to deal with is finding the balance between the ambition to preserve their identity as grass root organizations and the need for professionalization. Also they have to learn to build and maintain relationships with other organizations and actors in their environment on which they are dependent: governments, private parties and professionals.