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.

Societal and technological developments (such as the digital and energy revolutions) move faster than existing institutions can keep up with. The developments may lead to a metaphorical institutional void, which brings questions about the nature of the void, the changing rules, practices and responsibilities, and about the strategies to deal with the void. The concept has been around for a while but (again) seems relevant to understand current socio-technological innovations and challenges, that also allow us to further conceptualise the institutional void. In this introduction to the issue, we discuss the concept of an institutional void and explore how it is used in various domains of study, including public administration. We argue for how the concept is relevant today and therein also introduce the topics that are discussed in this special issue.

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.

Over the last three years, various G1000s have been organized in Dutch municipalities. These citizen summits share a number of characteristics: random selection of participants, an open agenda, dialogue and inclusion of the entire ‘system’ (inhabitants, politicians, civil servants). The G1000s aim to renew local democracy and to change the relations between citizens and governments. Both of these objectives affect the role of local councilors and this paper discusses their opinions and attitude towards a G1000. It shows that councilors regard the G1000 as complementary to representative democracy and that they want be involved both in the organization of a G1000 in their municipality and the follow-up in local decision-making. On the one hand, this may lead to a better coupling between citizen initiatives and formal policy making. On the other hand, this entails the risk that a G1000 becomes institutionalized and loses its distinctive characteristics that make it a new form of democracy.

This article is about how education administrators value complex issues or dilemmas they are confronted with in their governance practices, and which strategies they adopt to cope with them. Professional governance of school organisations was introduced gradually over the past fifteen years, and at the same time governance in education has gained in complexity and raises considerable risks, requiring more time, knowledge and expertise of education administrators. We draw on the theoretical perspective of coping to investigate the potential of education administrators to deal with the complexity, impediments and social and regulatory pressure in their daily practice. Our study consists of a comparative case study of six education administrators in secondary education. Their agency has been researched qualitatively with the help of the hierarchical model of coping strategies of Skinner and colleagues. The results show that the issues and dilemmas education administrators find most complex are about educational innovation and numbers of students enrolled. Education administrators value these issues or dilemmas hardly as threatening, and they adopt various proactive coping strategies to deal with them, such as information seeking or bargaining.

The speed and disruptive character of digital innovations affect social structures and practices faster than institutions can keep up with them. This results in an ‘institutional void’, i.e. a gap between the rules and institutions and their ability and the effectiveness of their measures. It also affects the institutional stability that is the basis for the paradigm of collaboration-based types of governance. In this paper, we explore how parties are able to set up collaboration for digital security, which is inherently a topic that transcends organisational boundaries. Yet digital innovations constantly enable new challengers that might not share the same incentives for collaboration. Life in an institutional void is convenient for them and enables new business models. Hence, a key question is whether (institutionalised) collaboration is a sustainable model for addressing shared problems like digital security. We explore this question in the domain of financial cyber fraud. The new (regulatory) space currently being created for innovators suggests that the answer is ‘no’. It is too early to say how this will play out specifically and we argue for further research into the antecedents for collaboration in institutional voids.

Regional networks are often used by the central government in the Netherlands as a way of translating national purposes into regional action. At the same time regional networks increasingly arise from the bottom up. In short, it gets busy in the region. This article describes research on regional networks encouraged by the national government to handle complex issues in the domain of education and the labor market. The central question of this article is the way in which stimulating regional cooperation can be used effectively by the central government. Thirteen networks are studied with the help of interviews, questionnaires and data from social networks. The research findings show that in these networks that are encouraged from the top down, there is a tension between achieving short-term results and building cooperative relations, and that a sense of urgency in the region is an important prerequisite for success. This calls for more bottom-up co-determination of the policy agenda and the pace. In addition, there appeared to be a strong overlap between seemingly separate networks, thematically as well as in terms of staffing, which again offers opportunities for creating synergy. The findings call for using these ‘meta networks’ in the formation of networks. Both notions lead to some strategies for the effective use of regional networks.