This article shows how the municipality of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) has coped with the popularity of home sharing platform Airbnb. In collaboration with Airbnb, the municipality of Amsterdam was the first to come up with regulations for home sharing. However, enforcement of these rules proved difficult without access to user data of the Airbnb platform. In addition, a scientific (statistical) assessment of the effects of homesharing is also difficult without open data. As a result, the legitimacy of the platform has weakened in the eyes of some stakeholders. The article ends with some general reflections how government can cope with sharing economy platform. In particular, it is argued that the right-to-challenge principle may prove hard to apply to sharing platforms.

Transparency is a token of modern governance and is said to serve many different goals. Earlier research has shown that the disclosure of information will only be seen by the public and serve its goals if ‘transparators’, such as news media, pay attention to the information. The news media cannot be expected to be uncritical implementers of transparency policies; they will only do so when the policy and ensuing story fit their criteria for newsworthiness. This paper analyzes when and how news media pay attention to different types of policies serving different types of goals. It does so on the basis of quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 8 important cases of transparency-policies in the Netherlands in the past decade. The analysis shows that, even for these high profile cases, the amount of media attention for disclosed information is limited. The analysis also suggests that the media primarily tend to treat items in neutral or critical frames. Particularly in cases where the disclosed information is about the government itself, media stories seem to be primarily negative. These results suggest, in line with prior research, that transparency-policies may easily fail to be effective.

What do Public Administration scholars tell Public Administration students in the Netherlands about the study of Public Administration as science, public administration as empirical domain and how it works? By means of interpretative and historicizing research I studied student handbooks and historical reviews on the origination myth and self-image of Public Administration.
It shows a very delineated origin myth and a mainly non-political and neutral self-image. Therefore I conclude that Public Administration mostly neglects its political-normative foundations, which deliver problems in how and what Public Administration scholars teach. This article shows the importance of the political-normative foundations and includes a plea for Public Administration as true political science.

Infrastructure and adjacent areas represent extensive social value. However, infrastructure and areas are still often developed sectoral and independent. In the Netherlands, national spatial policies strive for combining infrastructure and area as one integrated approach as this is expected to result in more spatial quality. Taking this perspective, this article discusses trendy concepts in current Dutch planning, such as: adaptive planning, public and private cooperation and challenge-oriented approaches (‘opgave-gericht werken’ which focuses less on realising a project but more on the current and future issues and challenges in an area). This article argues that these concepts are closely related. Adaptive planning defines the rules of the game and the playing field, within which cooperation may develop. Cooperation is a means for creating spatial quality in interaction within this playing field. After all, generated quality can be considered as a contribution to the specific objectives and interest of the various partners. A challenge-oriented approach is the process for generating spatial quality from synergies in combined infrastructure and spatial development. This article aims to explore the relationships between adaptive planning, public and private cooperation and challenge-oriented approaches and to provide starting points for further research and discussion.

According to various authors, Dutch local autonomy is under pressure. Because of the many tasks transferred to municipalities, local authorities hardly have time for their own tasks and initiatives. Local autonomy requires that local administrators have sufficient time, attention, and money. In this article, the concept of local autonomy is discussed, as well as why local autonomy is under pressure and who is responsible for (a sufficient amount of) local autonomy. In general, local autonomy is the responsibility of both national as well as local politicians and administrators, but on both levels, there is still much room for improvement.

In The Netherlands an innovative water safety policy is under development: multi-layered safety. This innovation is a move from a preventive approach (levees) towards a risk approach. Mitigation of consequences for spatial measures and disaster management too are considered in reducing flood risks. The theory of path dependence teaches us that many technical, financial and institutional factors keep the current policy system in its equilibrium. This complicates policy innovations. This article contains a case study that explains how pilots contribute to a process of policy innovation. It concludes that enshrining results in the ‘home organizations’ and synchronizing pilots with running policy processes is essential. The pilots also show that policy renewal concerns a process of ‘muddling through intelligently’.

For aldermen in Dutch municipalities, ‘integrity’ increasingly seems to be an important factor causing their downfall. A lot of aldermen have resigned in the recent years because of ‘integrity’ and invariably local and national media were actively involved in this process. This article deals with the question of the role of the media in integrity affairs involving aldermen that have to resign. To answer this question, the authors analysed ten affairs that occurred in 2014 in which an alderman had to resigned (forced or voluntarily) because of integrity issues. The analysis shows that local media, regardless of how small they may be and how limited their means, often report extensively about integrity issues. In some cases, local media even act as accountability forums that call these aldermen to account. In other cases, the coverage in local media leads to further questions and calls for political accountability in the municipal council. Sometimes the media ‘merely’ report on the debates between the municipal council and the municipal board, but by doing so magnify the impact of an affair in the local community. In this way, the media fulfil their democratic role as watchdogs of local democracy, a role in which they bark loudly, often persistently and sometimes venomously about (alleged) integrity affairs.

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.

Is local democracy in the Netherlands equipped for its mission? There is confusion and disagreement about the answer to this question. How people assess existing democratic practices is strongly influenced by one of the three main perspectives: representative democracy, participative (deliberative) democracy or ‘do-democracy’ (associative democracy). But to be able to have this discussion in the first place, empirical knowledge is required about the state of democracy at the local level. In this article (apart from the introduction, the first in a series on the local democratic audit) the authors bring together the available research data and organize these data with the help of David Easton’s system model: from input of citizens and civil society via throughput to output and finally feedback again in the political system. The research presented offers some insight in the state of local democracy, although it is not possible to give a final assessment. That depends on the perspective on democracy chosen, but it is also not possible because of the fragmented and incomplete nature of the research on local democracy in the Netherlands. The authors advocate contributing to these discussions with more empirical knowledge. The overview in this article shows that there is work to be done in this respect.

Central concern of this article is tracing back how the making-responsible of citizens takes shape within Dutch speeches from the throne, government statements and reports of the Dutch Social and Cultural Research Institute (SCP) ever since the 1960s. The Dutch participation society, a term much discussed ever since mentioned in the 2013 speech of the throne, is often associated with a withdrawing government and a coming to end of the welfare state. At the same time, according to several authors, the notion of a withdrawing government that operates within a network of multiple equal actors has brought along the need for a widening of the government’s repertoire of action. This has been characterized as making-responsible citizens on conditions of the state. It has raised doubts about true government-withdrawal and authors have related it to the dominance of neo-liberal thinking ever since the 1990s. Applying an analysis framework derived from discourse analysis, it is made tangible in this article how within political discourse beginnings of the making-responsible of citizens can be traced to the 1960s, more than thirty years earlier than expected. It is argued that this longer history makes a plea for encouraging the political dimension of citizenship all the more important.

While international research gives increasing attention to geographical factors in education, this perspective is lacking in Dutch research and policy. That a geographical perspective is badly needed, is demonstrated on the basis of the proposed policy to promote new schools in the Netherlands. Current housing policies for Dutch schools are described, pointing at disputes between municipalities and school boards who hold shared responsibilities. Next, foreign housing policies for new schools are studied, that is for friskolor in Sweden, free schools in England and charter schools in Texas (USA). Experiences abroad not only testify that very different choices can be made, but indicate that housing policies may in the long run have a substantial impact on segregation and educational inequality. It is also shown that new schools are mainly located in urban areas. It is argued that in addition to costs for new schools, friction costs for existing schools need to be considered. In all, a geographical perspective on education is needed, so as to prevent increasing segregation and social inequality as well as wasting public financial resources.

In the 1990’s, the Dutch social democrats were trailblazers of what became known internationally as the politics of the Third Way, a new middle course between social democracy and neoliberalism. From the start, the Dutch Third Way distinguished itself from its Anglo-Saxon counterparts by its implicit character. The Dutch social democrat party (Partij van de Arbeid, PvdA) never fully embraced the Third Way and has sought to downplay the idea of a break with traditional social democratic thinking, combining Third Way practice with more classical social democratic rhetoric. The resulting political ambiguity, this paper argues, is at the centre of the present identity crisis of the social democrat party. Even though Third Way ideology has at times been declared dead, the range of attitudes, strategies and policy proposals that were introduced under its banner, still play a vital and prominent role in Dutch politics. While in the UK and the US, communitarianism was from the very beginning a defining feature of the Third Way, in the Netherlands this only came to the fore in 2012 under the leadership of Samsom and Asscher, and in the plea for a participation society under the Rutte II government. Leading us to conclude that the reports of the Third Way’s death are greatly exaggerated.

In 2015 Amsterdam introduced a new primary school admissions system. This system is rooted in various desegregation pilots, including two based on the ‘controlled choice’ approach. In conjunction with one of these pilots located in West Amsterdam, we researched the criteria parents used while thinking about (de-)segregation in primary schools and parents’ attitudes regarding the controlled choice approach. Due to political developments between 2008 and 2011, we considered our data useless for policy discussions. The introduction of a new admissions system, however, gives our data a newfound relevance. This article therefore describes how parents in socio-economically diverse neighbourhoods think about segregation and school choice. The 249 parents we interviewed or surveyed supported schools with a ‘good mix’, but they had diverging opinions about the meaning of such terms. The parents were optimistic with regard to controlled choice, even if this could in some ways limit their own options. We conclude that the political resistance to desegregation at the primary school level cannot be justified by empirically unfounded claims about the perceptions and preferences of parents. We hope that our findings may lead to empirically grounded policy evaluation and policy making.

Bedrijven en andere organisaties ontvangen vaak veel enquêtes en klagen over de lastendruk hiervan. Tevens dalen responsaantallen en zijn er zorgen over de kwaliteit van de respons. In dit artikel wordt beschreven wat er gedaan kan worden om de motivatie van bedrijven en organisaties, en hun respondenten, te verhogen om daarmee bij organisatie- en bedrijfsenquêtes de responsaantallen en de responskwaliteit te verbeteren.

In many OECD countries, healthcare sectors have become increasingly concentrated as a result of mergers. However, detailed empirical insight into why healthcare providers merge is lacking. Also, we know little about the influence of national healthcare policies on mergers. We fill this gap in our knowledge by analyzing the results of a survey study among Dutch executives about mergers between healthcare organizations in the period from 2005 to 2012. During this period, Dutch healthcare providers faced a number of policy changes, including increased competition, more pressure from purchasers (health insurers), growing financial risks, de-institutionalization of long-term care and decentralization of healthcare services to municipalities. Our study shows that Dutch healthcare providers predominantly merge to improve the provision of healthcare services and to strengthen their market position. Efficiency and financial reasons are also important drivers of merger activity in healthcare. Motives for mergers seem to be related to changes in health policy, in particular to the increasing pressure from competitors, insurers and municipalities.

The world of public administration is changing: in many countries around the globe specialized behavioral insights units are on the rise in governments. Behavioral insights teams (or nudge units) are often modelled on the famous BIT UK, although there are important national variations. These units specialize in the application of behavioral insights to the design and evaluation of public policies. This article reports on an interview with the the leader of the Behavioral Insights Team of the Ministry of Economical Affairs in the Netherlands. Four main items are discussed: (1) What projects should behavioral insights units undertake? (2) What mix of professional expertise is necessary? (3) What processes should be instituted? And (4) How should these units be positioned within existing government departments?

National officials play an important role in all phases of the EU policy process and are often assumed to be more euro-enthusiastic than other citizens. Yet, thus far systematic knowledge on their views on EU integration is lacking. This study fills this gap through recently collected survey data among Dutch officials (N = 3509). We find first that at least for officials, hard and soft euroscepticism are no gradations on the same scale, but separate dimensions. Second, both sociological and rational choice institutionalism help explain bureaucratic euroscepticism, where the latter seems to have a somewhat stronger explanatory power. Third, officials are on average indeed more euro-enthusiastic than other citizens. However, (a) relatively fewer officials are strongly euro-enthusiastic compared to the general population; (b) the total share of eurosceptics among officials is practically the same as the general population, and (c) significantly more officials report to be ‘strongly eurosceptic’ than among the wider population.

Do energy cooperatives work together with municipalities in the area of energy and, if this is so, how can this cooperative relationship be interpreted from a public administration perspective? That is the central question of this article. The experiences with cooperation of four frontrunners amongst the energy cooperatives show that in many areas a fruitful cooperative relationship has been developed. In other areas cooperation is lacking because the municipality stands aloof as soon as the energy cooperative provides services to citizens and/or companies or because the purchase of green energy by the municipality from their own energy cooperative cannot simply be carried out. In the development of renewable energy projects it also suits municipalities to be reluctant because they not only promote local renewable energy but are also responsible for the spatial quality. From the perspective of public administration it is striking that the variety of municipal roles increases the complexity of cooperative relationship with energy cooperatives. For energy cooperatives it is difficult to understand that the municipality sometimes behaves like an ally, but can also be reluctant. The variety of the bond between both parties is first of all apparent from the need of an own identity and autonomy in the energy cooperatives. Secondly, two of the four energy cooperatives that were analysed needed support in a financial emergency.

Local authorities know for some time from experience with partnerships with local communities in the area of sustainable development that the urgency of climate change increases and that citizens develop into an equal partner. The convergence of these two motivations asks for an innovative way of acting, in which the performance of local authorities is a crucial factor for the ultimate success of local sustainable energy projects in which citizens are actively involved or will be involved. This article exposes the ways in which local authorities innovate with policy for the support of active citizenship in the production of locally generated sustainable energy. The article also explores the barriers that arise. The authors analyse two cases on different levels of government; ‘The Energy-workplace’ (in the Dutch province Fryslân) and ‘The Armhoede sustainable energy landscape’ (in the Dutch municipality Lochem). The cases show that policy innovations crystallize as well at ‘arm’s length’ distance as in the direct sphere of influence of the (local) authority. However, innovation takes place by the grace of the space in the existing institutional framework and the political (and administrative) system. Formal guidelines (like policy or regulation), persons, and informal practices of the traditional policy implementation may hinder a productive interaction between (active) citizens and government.

This special issue contains five articles based on empirical research into energy transition at the local level. The focus is on the role of local authorities in the energy transition and on partnerships between local authorities (municipalities, provinces, regions) and local communities in the area of sustainable development. The three guest editors have also written an introduction and conclusion for this special issue.