This contribution addresses the question of competences and skills for public professionals to improve collaboration. The authors start their search by looking for a conceptual focus. Poor collaboration is conceptualized as ‘colliding rationalities’. Herbert Simon has introduced the concept of ‘bounded rationalities’ to oppose scientists who think that improvement of public administration is possible through ex ante theorizing. Human beings not only have a limited capacity for rational thinking, but there also multiple rationalities that restrict each other. A classic distinction is made by Ig Snellen: a) legal rationality, b) political rationality, c) financial/economic rationality, d) scientific rationality. Not only are rationalities restricted, but also collisions can occur between professionals who adhere to different rationalities. These collisions have to do with their relational network, with the nature of their tasks and with their way of thinking and communicating. Therefore the authors have worked with different groups of professionals to find out which competences they need to deal with these collisions or make them productive. They did so on the basis of specific cases in their daily working practice. Jan Fraanje comments on this contribution as a practitioner in a Dutch municipality.

Deze bijdrage gaat over goed opdrachtnemer/-geverschap bij beleidsgericht onderzoek in de gezondheidszorg. De constatering luidt dat de relatie tussen kennisvrager/opdrachtgever en kennisaanbieder/opdrachtnemer vaak spanningsvol is. Aan de hand van de werkpraktijk van kennisprogrammeur ZonMw wordt beschreven onder welke voorwaarden de kans op bruikbaarheid en gebruik van kennis zo groot mogelijk is. Daarbij geldt goede interactie tussen onderzoekers en kennisgebruikers in beleid of praktijk als de meest kritische succesfactor. In essentie komt goed opdrachtnemerschap neer op de gedragslijn: ken uw opdrachtgever; het gevraagde mag niet onbekend zijn. Goed opdrachtgeverschap komt in essentie neer op de complementaire gedragslijn: duidelijk formuleren wat je verlangt; het onbekende mag niet worden gevraagd.

There are many practical and academic concerns about public professionals and the pressures and burdens they experience. Professional autonomies and skills are reduced, it is argued, as a result of businesslike new public management, in order to control service results. The solution is clear: organizational logics must be weakened, professional autonomies must be enlarged and professional ways of working must be ‘rescued’. In this paper we re-interpret this presumed problem by analyzing: the interaction between organizational and professional logics, by relating these to a broader institutional logic and by tracing the contribution of individual professional motivations. Professionals, it is shown, can be motivated by broader ambitions to serve society. Such public service motivation consists of three types of motives: rational/instrumental, affective and normative. Our results show that employees in different public professional services show different patterns of motives, which we mainly explain by relating their motivations to the nature of the services they render – whether they render people-changing or people-processing services. These institutional dimensions imply that professional work can be managed, not so much by businesslike ‘market logic’ but by strengthening the meaning of the work professionals do. Professional pressures against organizations do not have to be suppressed – they can be productively used.

In this paper it is argued that the discourse on the retreating government is a story about mobilizing executive power deemed necessary for enforcing a neoliberal worldview. The intellectual discourse about the retreating government, the argument goes, develops as a radical and neoliberal critique of the Keynesian planning and organization of the enlightenment – an organization that is above all expressed in the postwar welfare state. The Dutch policy discourse, by contrast, is of a practical nature: it is about the organization of the government retreat. In the reconstruction of the policy discourse, as it is manifest in leading policy documents of the Dutch central government, it is observed that this discourse has emancipated from the intellectual discourse. The policy discourse of the retreating government has developed into a financial management discourse, free from European ideals.

The military is generally considered to act as a professional when it comes to retreating forces from military battleground or international conflict areas. At the same time recent national experiences with the withdrawal of national troops from international peacekeeping operations are filled with disappointments and crises. In this article the authors question the idea that these disappointments and crises are simply due to problems of reduced military competence or military morale. They argue that the military is still the alleged expert who knows how to perform military retreats and other military actions. At the same time they show that network-like decision-making structures that are inherent to the deployment of troops in international peacekeeping missions, have become a major obstacle for the military to act in its own right. The lessons that government can learn from the military experience are firstly, that decisions for national public cutbacks should be accompanied by a more in-depth (re)consideration of public (key) tasks than up to now was considered appropriate, and secondly, that more trust should be shown in the skills, knowledge and motivation of professionals to delineate and constrain the boundaries of their own fields of expertise.

While the belief in a socially engineered society has been renounced to a large extent, in cities actors continue to struggle with the question how their plans can be steered on goal achievement. This article addresses a steering philosophy that is based on an emergent adaptive urban development process. This means that urban strategies adapt during the process by connecting to initiatives from the market and civil society. The central question of this article is how specific projects are ‘made’ in accordance with the intentions of the actors involved and how these projects are connected to larger policy stories for the city. In this article perspectives are explored that have replaced the old thinking in terms of ‘social engineering’. On the basis of two case studies in the Netherlands (Brainport Eindhoven and Mainport Rotterdam) an emergent adaptive strategy is explored as a perspective for action. This perspective is not only about ‘social engineering’, but also about ‘social connecting’. An emergent adaptive strategy is not designed on the drawing table, but it emerges during the practice of project development out of an attitude that is conscious of the environment, connective and reflective.

Na het aantreden van Rutte II heeft de bestuurlijke opschaling van gemeenten en provincies twintig maanden lang op de agenda gestaan. Zoals bekend hebben de plannen van het kabinet de eindstreep niet gehaald. Vooral bij de meest betrokken provincies bestond er kritiek op het ontbreken van een visie en onderbouwing. In dit artikel wordt onderzocht in hoeverre een netwerkanalyse van het verplaatsingsgedrag daarin zou kunnen voorzien. Voor een volgende ronde, die zich mogelijk al snel weer aandient. De uitkomsten van verschillende algoritmes voor netwerkanalyse worden vergeleken. Het begrip daily urban system, gekoppeld aan welvaartstheoretische inzichten (Tordoir), dient als inhoudelijke leidraad. Netwerkanalyse blijkt zakelijke argumenten op te leveren die behulpzaam kunnen zijn bij het trekken van (nieuwe) bestuurlijke grenzen, ook al zullen deze om verschillende redenen nooit alleenzaligmakend zijn.

Nowadays municipalities in the Netherlands work together more intensively with other municipalities in the region. Also cooperation with companies, institutions and societal organizations is more often looked for at the regional level. In practice this brings along many problems and difficulties. For several reasons it appears not to be easy to combine the implementation strengths of municipalities and societal partners. This article presents a new approach (based on the theory of ‘new regionalism’) to regional implementation strength. This approach is not only about designing regional administrations, but is mainly about the factors that induce administrations as well as companies and institutions to commit themselves jointly for the region. To increase the regional implementation strength more is needed than the formation of a regional administrative structure in which municipalities do not cooperate in a non-committal manner. To induce municipalities and societal partners to commit themselves jointly to handling new tasks or new challenges it is also necessary to have a clear strategic vision on these issues that binds parties and makes them enthusiastic and that regional cooperation is rooted in a societal breeding ground. It also asks for an administrative structure that does justice to the contribution every municipality and societal partner makes to the realization of the strategy and for a democratic involvement of municipal councils and sector-based interest groups.

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.

Concerns about mobile phone masts are often put down as unfounded fears of health risks. However, our ethnographic study of mast siting controversies shows that citizens mostly want to be democratically involved in the siting decisions. There is no room for such engagement in the national antenna policy, thus, citizens shift their attention to the possibility of health risks. The national government responds to this with more research and risk communication. However, the centrality of science leads to a shift in the discussion towards the credibility of science. Even a Klankbordgroep (Sounding Board) with all stakeholders fails to change the focus. This article shows that local conflicts are not so much the result of individual concerns, which is the subject of many social sciences studies, but are the outcome of a dynamic interaction between governments, citizens and scientists. Governments should not frame a local issue only in terms of a scientific problem.

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 the near future, the Dutch government intends to change the rules relating to smoking bans in the hospitality industry again. After a complete ban, coming into force in July 2008, and introducing an exception for small bars in June 2011, the complete ban will return this year. This article describes the law regarding smoking bans in the Netherlands, and reports along researches of the relevant authority and a commercial research institute the effectiveness of the bans. From these findings it becomes clear that the hospitality industry did a good job in complying with the bans. But there is one exception: small bars. Next we explain, based on the ideas of Kagan and Skolnick and Elias the effectiveness of smoking bans.

Achter opdrachtresearch gaat de veronderstelling schuil dat de tussen- en eindresultaten van beleidsonderzoek vroeg of laat ook benut worden en onderdeel worden van een proces van bezinning op beleid. Dit artikel handelt hierover. Diverse aspecten van benutting van onderzoek komen aan bod, zoals de definitie en vormen van benutting. Er worden vier richtingen onderscheiden om de omvang en vorm van benutting of onderbenutting op te sporen. Het artikel geeft voorts verklaringen voor achterblijvende benutting en bevat adviezen om te komen tot meer benutting. Voor ambtenaren, bestuurders en partners in beleidsnetwerken biedt deze beschouwing aanknopingspunten om researchresultaten desgewenst beter te benutten. En voor onderzoekers bevat dit artikel tal van aanzetten tot hypothesevorming voor verder onderzoek.

Deze terreinverkenning op basis van literatuuronderzoek handelt over een internationaal actueel, maar nationaal onderbelicht thema dat hier wordt aangeduid als ‘intersectorale governance voor gezondheid’. De verkenning is geschreven voor de landelijke beleidspraktijk, vanuit het perspectief van nationale beleidsambtenaren als potentiële dragers van intersectorale governance. In het licht van de bestuurlijke kernopdracht voor de komende jaren, werken aan een goede gezondheid, wordt aandacht besteed aan het belang van integrale beleidsvoering op centraal niveau en de hardnekkigheid waarmee het actief inzetten ervan uitblijft. Een focus op beleidsambtenaren als dragers van intersectorale governance biedt interessante mogelijkheden om uit die impasse te komen. Zeker als zij daarbij adequaat worden ondersteund door relevant onderzoek.

The article provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the Night Time Economy and how the Collective Pub Ban is applied in three Dutch cities: Utrecht, Amersfoort and Den Bosch. The Collective Pub Ban is a measure taken in the Netherlands in an effort to make pubs, bars and clubs co-responsible for maintaining security. Depending on the severity of the conduct, an offender can be denied of entry to these venues for five years. During this period, the offender is not allowed to enter the particular pub or any of the other pubs, bars and clubs that participate in this measure. On the basis of 84 interviews, we show how these venues fill out their new responsibilities with respect to the Collective Pub Ban-measure. Also, we answer the question what this new measure means for the quality of the public space.