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.

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.

Professionals often have problems with governmental policies they have to implement. This can lead to diminished legitimacy and lower policy performance. The goal of this article is to identify the main reasons why professionals resist implementing new policies. An interdisciplinary approach is taken. From public administration literature, I use the policy alienation model, which consists of five dimensions: strategic, tactical and operational powerlessness, societal meaninglessness and client meaninglessness. These are possible reasons why professionals resist public policies (‘resistance to change’, a concept drawn from change management literature). I test these assumptions using a survey among 1,317 healthcare professionals. The results show that when professionals experience that a policy is meaningless for society or for their own clients, they show strong resistance. A lack of perceived influence is much less important in explaining resistance, although this is partly dependent on the particular profession someone belong to. The policy alienation model can help policy makers and managers to develop policies which are accepted by professionals. The article ends with practical recommendations for policy makers, managers and professionals.

In co-production processes, citizens and professionals both contribute to the provision of public services and try to enhance the quality of the services they produce. Although government offers several opportunities for co-production, not all citizens decide to actually take part. Current insights in citizens’ individual motivations offered by the co-production literature are limited. In this article, we integrate insights from different streams of literature to build a theoretical model that explains citizens’ motivations to co-produce. We test the model using empirical data of Dutch neighborhood watches.

Dutch local government is more and more regarded as a ‘first government’. Vision documents of the association of municipalities and national policy plans stress the importance of local government for improving public governance. This ‘new localism’ builds upon two conflicting perspectives to local government: the modernization model and the political community model. As a result, local governments are becoming overloaded by many new and conflicting demands. A debate about how both perspectives to the ‘first government’ can be balanced, is therefore needed.

Based on the experience of citizens initiatives in Antwerpen (Belgium), Dortmund (Germany) and Rotterdam (the Netherlands), this article explores the roles of citizens in these projects. The initiatives were not started by already active citizens, but by inactive citizens who were triggered to take action by an event in their direct surroundings. The cases studied show that many small, simple and everyday strategies, which are often overlooked by researchers, are meaningful for successful citizenship. The will to participate is not so much ideologically or democratically driven, but driven by a perceived practical need for action. Governments should aim to support and facilitate these initiatives without aiming to canalize these activities according to their own political or democratic rationality.

The report Confidence in Citizens by the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy dominantly supports increased room for citizen participation. Based on many examples, the report shows how society benefits from the many citizens’ initiatives and how government interference can hamper or even obstruct these initiatives, which do not fit the logic of civil servants. The report gives four, rather general suggestions of how policy makers could respond to these citizens’ initiatives. The generic character of these recommendations can be ascribed to a weak problem analysis and a biased understanding of how government actions negatively interfere with citizens’ initiatives. The Council could have asked more critical questions with regards to citizens initiatives and how they should respond to the logic of government.

Amidst the turbulence of recent crises, governments’ capacity to govern and to deliver public value is under serious pressure. Public institutions are working hard to come up with new and improved schemes for dealing with complex and wicked policy issues that have emerged or just wont go away. But government alone cannot solve most of these issues. Governments already attempted to make ‘better, smarter policy’ in the hopes of raising performance. They also invested heavily in ‘participation’ of citizens, by inviting them to ‘co-create’ policy or ‘join-up’ with government agencies. However, this image of collaboration is one-sided. Besides the efforts initiated by governments themselves, there is a wide array of emerging activities. In these practices, it is not the government that takes action, but society takes ‘public matters’ into its own hands. Just as in many other countries, in The Netherlands groups of citizens have started to organize certain services, tasks or activities that used to be provided by the central or decentralized governmental institutions by themselves (and in most cases, for themselves). This article conceptualizes these emerging practices and analyses how they affect the world of policy making and what they may mean for public administration research.

This article investigates whether the local practices growing under the Wet Maatschappelijke Ondersteuning (Wmo; Law for social participation) can be viewed as examples of ‘transformation of the welfare state’-in-action. The article argues that indeed, a number of Dutch cities is trying to create a shift in the balance of responsibilities of citizens, social networks, civil society and government that can be judged an operationalization of the more abstract recommendations of many ‘welfare state reformers’. It remains to be seen however, whether these attempts will actually result in change. There are both practical problems and fundamental questions to be tackled. The question whether the transformation wished for by many from a political perspective, is actually feasible (given the political and societal constraints) should be addressed firmly by both local and national actors.As it goes, the opposite is the case: the question of the feasibility of the Wmo seems to have vanished in the void between parliament and municipalities.

The problems discussed in the articles of this special issue are not merely wicked in the sense of involving normative dissensus and factual uncertainty. They also are systemic: they reflect institutional inertia, discursive inertia and the disruptive impact of sociological trends (individualization, Europeanization etc.) on incumbent practices and institutions. This systemic character tends to makes them persistent: while fundamental change is unavoidable, such change is likely to be bothered by the very institutional and discursive inertia it seeks to address. Reflecting, from a public policy studies point of view, on previous articles we deduce four principles from urban practices to deal with these challenges: 1) reduce dissent and uncertainty where possible; 2) acknowledge normative diversity by promoting context-specific solutions; 3) organize policies around societal/market initiatives that have emerged in a context and 4) define institutional changes that may further promote and simplify such policies and seize opportunities for structural change.

Sustainability, the question of how our system of prosperity could be maintained, is one of the main issues of the coming decades. To combine economic growth and a pleasant environment, society needs to scale back its resource use and the ensuing pressures on the environment, by a factor of five. The challenge is to do more with less; something for which there is no instant solution. The city is the place where this change will begin, not by ‘big’ government with ‘big’ plans, but by the energetic society. Citizens and the business community are motivated by their wish for a clean economy and a pleasant living environment. The rise of the information society has increased their ability to exchange knowledge and ideas, releasing creativity and creating new solutions. If city governments are to tap into the strength of society, they must embrace the initiatives and join citizens and business in the empowered deliberative search for sustainable solutions. The goal of a clean economy is within reach, but it demands comprehensive physical and cultural change, in which local initiatives may lead the cultural change towards a broad vision of a strong, sustainable society. A large role for government remains, but high quality, low carbon cities may be the winners of the future.

The digital revolution enables civil servants to create innovation with others, across organizational boundaries and with larger groups. Traditional bureaucracies are challenged to put additional conditions and incentives in place to make this possible. The program ‘civil servant 2.0’, aimed at enabling and awareness raising among civil servants, itself also makes use of modern possibilities. One example is Pleio, a digital meeting place for civil servants and other officials and persons who want to share knowledge in a thematic, transboundary way. A dilemma civil servants face is that the hierarchy and the political leadership have to be open to opportunities and input generated from outside. The level of hierarchical support can be discovered when the opportunity emerges. This takes entrepreneurial civil servants: taking initiative with the aim of discovering emerging opportunities in the outside world before it is known how these will be evaluated by the hierarchy. Other enabling conditions are that this activity needs to be possible without taking-up too much of their time, a culture of transparency, the possibility to link with the world through modern ICT (despite possible risks), a safe hierarchical environment, and novel ways of accounting for their output.

Not only companies and citizens, but also governmental agencies are exploring the possibilities of new technologies to communicate with citizens. This article analyzes the challenges, risks and dilemmas of social media for Dutch civil servants. The theoretical framework that is used consists of a classical and a modern approach to public administration. In the classical ‘Weberian’ model, politicians are responsible for policy-making (and communication about it) and civil servants have to implement policies (‘the primacy of politics’). This principal approach implies a limited role of civil servants in social media. However, the modern approach to civil servants highlights their expertise and distinctive responsibilities. The pragmatical approach leaves more space for active participation of civil servants on the internet. Nevertheless, a fundamental reflection about the primacy of politics, the role of governmental communication and culture in the social media landscape remains necessary.

In this literature review we present and discuss the key concepts of this symposium issue: (good) governance, (public) values, and the management of tensions between public values. The article concludes with an overview of strategies on how to deal with public values as a prelude to the remainder of the symposium, and discusses the implications of the distinguished strategies for public administration practice.

Whilst embedding democratic innovations that increase and deepen citizen participation in decision making now is a common policy of governments in many countries, and theorists in democratic theory also tend to emphasize how good citizen participation is to democracy, the empirical evaluation of democratic innovations is still a rather unexplored area of research.

This article evaluates two types of democratic innovations, participatory governance and deliberative forums in the Netherlands and a large number of other Western countries. The findings show, for both types of innovation, that citizen participation contributes to the quality of democracy in several ways. The analysis also makes it clear that different designs produce different democratic effects, which also reflects tensions between democratic values; participatory governance projects are better at giving citizens influence, whereas deliberative forums appear to be better at promoting the exchange of arguments. Also, whereas cases of participatory governance are more open than deliberative forums, representation is higher for the deliberative type of cases. As a consequence politicians and policy makers can have a major impact on democracy; by choosing for a specific design of citizen participation they may encourage certain aspects of democracy more than others.