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.

More than twelve years after the appearance of the report of the Dutch Committee on the Future of Government Communication (‘Commissie Toekomst Overheidscommunicatie’) communication as the responsibility of the government is an important issue of debate and a discipline that is alive and kicking. We may even conclude that communication – in the terminology of this report – has conquered a place in the heart of policy. A lot is still unclear about the communicative function of government. On the normative question ‘why should the government communicate’ diverging answers are possible. However, the question is hardly discussed in practice and in science. For this reason the positioning of government communication as a separate discipline is also unclear. Reflection on the elementary values behind the discipline can reveal themes that have been invisible so far. The article investigates which values and motives are attached in theory and in practice to communication as a governmental function. For this reason a content analysis has been carried out of a number of volumes of five Dutch magazines (practical and scientific). The authors conclude that for professionals communication mainly is an instrument to support policy goals. The possibility to make a purposeful contribution with government communication to democratic values hardly is brought about, not so much in Communication Science as in Public Administration.

This essay reports on an academic self-examination of the functioning of the Review committee on district approach. By assessing statistics, investigating problem areas, holding organized meetings with stakeholders, and having spontaneous visits, the committee tried to find out how things really are. This raised the question of whether the picture of reality that they obtained was really better in terms of being truer and more real? Accessing true reality is an understandable ambition for contributing to the quality of policy and implementation, but one that comes from a tragic (because it is ultimately unrealizable) desire. The experiences were always open to interpretation.
After that, the committee had to find a way to convey its findings to the political and social arena where they could be discussed and exploited. At this stage, the committee’s report was a truth in itself. Finishing the report had to prompt a follow-up in the social and political arena by, in turn, reviewing how to take away from the encountered reality to a sufficient extent.
The search for true reality yielded valuable catch on that belief in a truer reality behind the presented truth image is gone. By participating in administrative reality, those investigating seek the truth. But they do so in a context that is not looking for the truth.

This article shows how top officials in ten European countries evaluate changes in the public sector based on a number of dimensions, such as quality, cost-efficiency, ethics, effectiveness and the attractiveness of the public sector as an employer. Senior public officials in the Netherlands are compared to their counterparts from 9 other European countries. The study is based on the large-scale academic COCOPS Top Executive Survey, and answers from 3,173 top public sector officials were used.
Results show that senior public officials in the Netherlands are very positive about changes in cost-efficiency and service quality in the public sector. Yet they are concerned about the attractiveness of the public sector as an employer and public trust in government. At the same time, senior public officials in the Netherlands appear to be among the most positive all nationalities about recent changes in how the public sector operates. Only with regard to changes in the attractiveness of the public sector as an employer are senior Dutch public officials considerably less optimistic.

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.

Public regulators and inspectorates are increasingly involved in self-regulatory initiatives. This contribution is about co-regulation, which are co-ordination efforts among public regulators and self-regulating institutions. In co-regulation arrangements typical regulation and oversight activities, such as standard setting, information gathering and sanctioning become subjects of co-ordination between public and private actors. Co-regulation arrangements are typically network efforts. At the same time ‘regulation’ has a hierarchical connotation. This paradox shows in interpretations of ‘governance’ and ‘the move from government to governance’, the latter being a popular phrase qualifying a change of the government’s role in society. Main question in this paper is what the changing role of government in society means for the assessment of co-regulation. Based on literature two implicit, but opposing interpretations of ‘governance’ and the change are described. This implicitness may cause unsound assessments of co-regulation, either too tough or too lenient. In this contribution the normative implications of both interpretations are made explicit for co-regulation. The argument is illustrated by the case of co-regulation in the Dutch coach travel industry.

Currently the Dutch government funds dozens of social interventions designed to tackle polarization and radicalization issues. It is still unknown whether the assumptions underlying these interventions are valid. This article puts the theories of change of such interventions to the test. Underlying causal assumptions of four dominant Dutch social policies were confronted with scientific evidence: (1) the system-based approach, (2) peer mediation, (3) intergroup contact and (4) self-esteem enhancement. System-based approaches – comparable to multi-systemic therapy (MST) – seem effective in reducing extremist behaviour in radical youth, but do not necessarily lead to an ideological change. In peer mediation, the causal link between the deployment of young people and the positive outcomes of such methods remains unclear. Peer mediation is also more likely to contribute in conflicts that have not yet escalated. Intergroup contact reduces prejudices about other groups, but has a limited effect. There is also no evidence for a long term effect and positive outcomes of intergroup contact do not automatically apply to adolescents. Finally, it is questionable that enhancing the self-esteem of (moslim) youth makes them more resilient against radical tendencies. In the same vein, the scientific evidence is ambiguous about whether increasing self-esteem results in social desirable behaviour or improved social relations.

In the past decades, employment and incomes were on the rise, social spending remained high while passive welfare states were progressively transformed into so-called ‘investment states’. Despite these favourable conditions, however, contemporary welfare states did not succeed in reducing poverty and inequality. What lies beneath the disquieting poverty standstill and how did welfare states miss this ‘window of opportunity’? In this article, we aim to shed more light on this question. We identify three structural trends behind the poverty standstill: rising employment has benefited workless households only partially; income protection for the working-age population out of work has become less adequate; social policies and, more generally, social redistribution have become less pro-poor. In other words, the reorientation of social expenditures to the employed occurred at the expense of those at risk in the labour market. The success of future poverty-reducing strategies will depend on the way policies aimed at labour market inclusion will be implemented and the emphasis on redistributive policies.

During the last decennium, social theory has provided us with path-breaking insights into the emergence of a new type of social risks (post-industrial, manufactured risks), and on policies which might deal with these risks (life politics; the social investment state). Especially the writings of Anthony Giddens are relevant in this respect. Unfortunately, these abstract ideas have thus far hardly been tested in empirical research. This article aims to fill this gap, by focussing on a telling example of a new, lifestyle related risk, which is the problem of overweight. How useful are Giddens' ideas on risk and social policy when applied in a concrete analysis of this particular problem and related policies? To answer this question, a comparative analysis has been carried out in two welfare states, the British and the Dutch. It will be argued that Giddens' abstract notions can indeed be applied effectively in a practical and fruitful framework for policy analysis. In this respect, the concepts of life politics and the social investment state seem promising, both for the practise and analysis of social policy development in European welfare states.

Although 'integration with retention of "own" culture' has ceased to be the dominant policy principle in Dutch minority policies for quite some time now, there are still remarkably many ethnically specific policy arrangements in the Netherlands. To explain this contradiction this paper introduces an administrative mechanism: the logic of making policy categories conflicts with the logic of policy implementation. The use of 'avoidant categories' – a particular type of policy category discussed in this paper – creates an administrative opportunity structure that unintendedly promotes ethnic fragmentation instead of integration in policy implementation. We illustrate the working of this mechanism in a comparative perspective; the Netherlands is not unique in this respect and experience in other countries is instructive.