Policy decisions taken now can determine the room for manoeuvre of future generations for a very long term. Politicians and civil servants often only seem to be interested in short-term implications, however. A major focus on the short term does not provide sufficient stability and impetus for long-term structural measures. This is primarily an institutional issue. In this article, the authors discuss how to instil a long-term focus in day-to-day processes of policymaking.

Despite the praise for Richard Florida’s new book The new urban crisis, it remarkably can be seen as an ‘urban confession’ or even as a ‘public penance’ for everything he wrote before in his glorious publication The rise of the creative class. That book offered the opportunity to look at the city in a different way and to formulate approaches for new urban politics. As a child, Florida and his family fled the city with its crime and other problems and moved to a suburb. As a young intellectual, Florida returned to the city, where he became interested in the role of the creative class in the process of re-urbanization. During his academic research, he discovered the ‘magic formula’ that cities could flourish by stimulating this creative class. However, his belief in this magic formula has eroded and now, about fifteen years after his publication, he admits he was mistaken. What seemed a solution appeared to be the cause of ‘the new urban crisis’. In his new book, the ‘urban optimist’ is replaced by the ‘urban pessimist’. New policies are needed that replace the concept of ‘the-winner-takes-all’ by ‘urbanism-for-all’ to stop the so-called ‘patchwork metropolis’ of segregated neighborhoods.

A provincial government in the Netherlands (Limburg) wants to start a movement designed to encourage citizens to live longer and healthier, and to participate in society. The province mobilizes partners to achieve these goals, with important tasks for the municipal governments. This article addresses the question how to help municipal governments in this approach. To draft a guide, a literature search was carried out, interviews were held and the policy practice was explored. This approach resulted in several building blocks that promote a departure from the trend in the health and participation of the citizens in Limburg. These building blocks are set in municipal activities in a Participation Compass social domain. Applying them indicates whether a municipal government is doing the right things to actively engage citizens. It gives an overall picture of the functioning of administrators, networkers and service providers. The report mentions strong points as well as learning points. It is crucial that results are recognized and accepted. The report also suggests improvement points for municipal governments and their partners on their path to the participation society.

In 2012, the municipal council of Emmen (a municipality of 107,000 inhabitants in the northeast of the Netherlands) took the final decision for the transformation and rehousing of the Wildlands Adventure Zoo on the basis of a so-called business case. Business cases are also being increasingly used in other organizations and sectors. However, not much is known yet about the qualities of the instrument. This article shows that the use of the business case in a specific case had value. For this case study, over 100 very diverse mainly digital sources, such as official decision-making documents, research reports and statement via social and other media, were used. In this way, in-depth knowledge was acquired about one of the mechanisms that underpinned the creation of the park. The sources are carriers of the narrative ‘Wildlands Emmen.’ Despite the success, a warning is called for. A healthy focus on results can result in ‘escalating’ commitment. Then the parties involved are linked to the project to such an extent that a way back is excluded by definition. Although the business case should be a ‘business-like’ justification, it seems that the mechanism of ‘self-justification’ enters into force. One shows through rationalization that previous decisions were right and then acts on these decisions in a sensible and competent manner. However, alternatives are not explicitly weighed against each other and there can be a tendency to underestimate the risks.

De preoccupatie met evidence based beleid miskent de exploratieve waarde van wetenschap voor beleid. In veel en de meest uitdagende beleidsprocessen, zoals de grote transities aangaande energie, zorg, landbouw en circulaire economie, moet de overheid beslissingen in onzekerheid nemen. Het beleidsonderzoek zou zich minder moeten bezighouden met wat zeker is en meer met wijs handelen in onzekerheid. Wetenschappers kunnen de besluitruimte voor politici duiden, en kunnen aangeven wat mogelijk effectieve maatregelen zijn. Dit bescheiden, voorzichtig aftasten van de werkelijkheid vereist arena’s waar wetenschap, bestuurders en volksvertegenwoordigers in gesprek zijn over de toepassing van wetenschappelijke inzichten in de praktijk van het hier en nu. Op diverse plekken in Nederland wordt geëxperimenteerd met dergelijke arena’s.

Er is de laatste tijd veel aandacht voor het omgaan met onzekerheid en dynamiek in beleid. Zo is er recent de roep om leren door doen, door een overheid die samen met de samenleving het experiment aan durft te gaan. Zo’n benadering van beleid als gezamenlijk experiment is veelbelovend, maar vergt ook passende methoden voor beleidsevaluaties. Adaptief beleid speelt hierop in. De laatste jaren is een belangrijke stap gezet in de ontwikkeling van methoden waarmee adaptief beleid ontwikkeld kan worden. Voor de evaluatie en de rol van evaluaties heeft dit belangrijke implicaties. In dit artikel wordt hierop verder ingegaan, op basis van ervaringen met adaptief beleid en beleidsevaluatie binnen het Nederlandse Deltaprogramma.

In the Netherlands, as in many other countries, housing supply fails to meet the rapidly increasing housing demand in already densely urbanised areas, contributing to rising housing prices and possibly gentrification. The state and local governments aim to satisfy this demand by densifying urban areas and by transforming urban brownfields and vacant office parks into residential areas, thus containing urban sprawl. However, the private actors needed to redevelop these areas operate according to a different institutional logic and discourse: the market. According to this market logic, urban transform is too expensive, even when partly subsidized, and, to some extent, sprawl is unavoidable to satisfy housing demand. The two different logics fail to deliver the housing needed. Building discourse coalitions is suggested as a possible way out of this deadlocked debate, while government actors might also aim to influence the housing market with novel, market oriented policy instruments.

The crowd increasingly plays a key role in facilitating innovations in a variety of sectors, spurred on by IT-developments and the concomitant increase in connectivity. Initiatives in this direction, captured under the umbrella-term ‘crowd-based innovations’, offer novel opportunities in socio-technical systems by increasing the access, reach and speed of services. At the same time, they signify important challenges because these innovations occur in a context of traditional, well-established institutional and governance structures and practices. This dynamic is captured in the idea of the ‘institutional void’: the tension between traditional structures and (radically) new initiatives. Existing rules, standards and practices are challenged, which raises questions about the safeguarding of public values such as quality, legitimacy, efficiency and governance of crowd-based innovations. This article argues that understanding these tensions requires supplementing empirical research with an explicitly normative dimension to reach thorough and balanced conclusions to facilitate innovation while protecting the valuable elements in existing rules and regulations. Illustrated by a number of short examples, we propose a multidisciplinary research agenda towards formulating appropriate governance structures.

Scientific knowledge plays a pivotal yet problematic role in identifying, assessing and evaluating climate impacts, and hence in their governance. This raises questions of how knowledge for adaptation policy is made. This article studies the production of authoritative and meaningful knowledge claims in the Delta Committee, regional water management and urban warming. It is argued that the conventional supply-and-demand conceptualisation with its notion of ‘knowledge transfer’ has fundamental flaws. This study shows how the wicked issue of climate change is tamed and made tractable in climate adaptation. In these processes knowledge of climate change transforms. This article presents a conceptual apparatus to study transformation. Transformation has a Janus face. While transformation brings climate change in conversation with localised meaning to create concrete adaptation responses, it also closes down and becomes blind to particular climate risks. Transformations are affected by the goals and institutions of policy fields. To overcome problems of blindness and cognitive path dependencies, more institutional change is necessary than the current piggyback approach of mainstreaming and knowledge co-creation entails.

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

Over eenzelfde beleid circuleren meerdere waarheden. Hoe valt dit te begrijpen? We gaan op verkenning rond ‘frame’ en ‘framing’ als veelgebruikte concepten in beleidsonderzoek. Na scherpstelling leert ons literatuuroverzicht dat een beleidskader idealiter gemarkeerd wordt als stabiel (naar basiselementen van structuur) maar in de praktijk geldt als inherent volatiel (naar voorkomen en effect). Iteratieve en vaak interactieve processen van framing kunnen dit verklaren zoals we aantonen met een case rond de Lokale Integrale VeiligheidsCellen (LIVC’s) in Brussel. Die case illustreert ook dat overheidsactoren zelf framen én met wisselend succes. Dat succes is te wijten aan factoren op individueel en institutioneel niveau en is cruciaal om vandaag te doorgronden. Want weten hoe een (on)waarheid over beleid te maken, is een eerste stap om framing (mogelijk) te kraken of meer te hanteren als tool om diverse frames, en dus finaal ook burgers, beter aan elkaar te haken. De voorbeelden van beleid en onderzoek in deze bijdrage zijn gekozen rond ‘wicked issues’ op diverse niveaus en terreinen van overheidsoptreden in België en elders.

For the legitimacy and ability of governments it is crucial to have insight in the worries of citizens about society and politics. In the Netherlands these worries are at the national level systematically mapped by the Dutch Social and Cultural Planning Agency (SCP) through their Continuous Research Citizen Perspectives (COB) for almost ten years now. At the local level there is a lack of information about what worries citizens. Insight in locally experienced problems will probably become even more important in the coming years because of the recent decentralizations of national governmental tasks to the municipalities. This article investigates which problems citizens perceive in their municipalities based on an analysis of data from the Local Electoral Research (LKO). The authors find a number of striking differences with the problems that are perceived at the national level in the same period. The municipal issues citizens mention offer opportunities, but they also point to the limited impact force of the municipal level of government. All in all the research findings are indicative of a substantial added value of the LKO with respect to the already longer running COB.

The term ‘second-order election’ indicates some elections are less important for citizens than national elections. This article investigates to what extent that applies for the Dutch elections of the municipal council. The research builds on literature about the second-order nature of the local elections in the Netherlands. The authors focus on the question to what extent the Dutch elections of the municipal council are second-order elections, by comparing voting at local and national elections in different ways. They compare four aspects of local and national voting: the turnout, the underlying factors that explain the turnout, the factors that explain voting for local parties, and the national or local character of the voting motives at the municipal elections in 2014. The results do not give a clear answer to the question to which extent municipal elections are locally oriented. The four different angles all deliver ambiguous patterns. So municipal elections indeed partly have a second-order nature as previously argued and shown. Nevertheless, we must not underestimate local affinity and political involvement. The fact that some of the citizens are interested in local politics, local parties and in local election electoral programmes is pointing out a local political dynamics.

How do you profile a diverse region? Based on what story, and under what name? The Southern Randstad, a conglomeration of large cities, medium-sized cities and villages in the Netherlands, wishes to make a name for itself worldwide as a metropolitan and innovative region. In this article, we will discuss how such a profiling strategy is realized. We will use insights from public administration, geography and those obtained from forty interviews with regional stakeholders. Selecting a new regional profile is a complex matter and sometimes even inappropriate. From the case study, it will be evident that in a pluralistic region collective profiling is only promising if it does not function as a replacement but as an enhancement. Furthermore, it will become clear that an area reference that refers to the two largest cities (Rotterdam and The Hague) in the region name is the most preferable. Finally, municipalities have to ‘play with scales’,i.e. they will have to align their profiling to suit the scale level at which they are presenting themselves.

Public value management encourages public organizations to move beyond existing frameworks and create value in flexible collaboration with societal partners. However, this approach creates problems for the accountability processes, because reports to politicians are often still directed at quantitative goals and rigid frameworks. This creates uncertainty and disagreement around the definition of value, the legitimacy of the new governance styles and the complexity of the new collaborations. This article describes the experiences of a large Dutch municipality where we conducted an experiment with an innovative accountability process for public value creation in the public health domain. Political administrators, council members, civil servants and societal partners have jointly assessed, through an interactive Public Value Table meeting format, what value their combined efforts in complex societal challenges have created. This experiment gives insight in the growing pains of public value creation, but also shows some possible solutions to address these tensions.

From 1974 until 1994 John Wevers was alderman in Maastricht (an old city in the deep south of the Netherlands) in the area of urban development. Before (from 1967 until 1974) Wevers was already a political activist in this domain. In 2016 he published his autobiography, which is very interesting for several reasons. The autobiography not only gives insight in the policy and the organization in the area of urban renewal in that period, but also in the functioning of local politics in general. At his farewell as an alderman in 1994 Wevers was the last remnant of a generation of Dutch Labour politicians (the other three were Adri Duivesteijn in The Hague, Ypke Gietema in Groningen and Fons Asselbergs in Amersfoort) who made architecture a public matter during the eighties. During the seventies Wevers also belonged to the generation of Dutch Labour politicians (amongst Jan van der Ploeg in Rotterdam, Max van den Berg in Groningen and Jan Schaefer in Amsterdam) who propagated the human scale and living in the inner city for ordinary people. In this respect they could rightfully call themselves the heirs of the legendary Labour alderman Floor Wibaut (alderman in Amsterdam from 1914 until 1931).