In the public as well as the semi-public sector numerous codes of good governance have been written. Although theses codes clearly lay down which public values must be the foundation of our administration, our newspapers often show examples of bad governance. It is striking that these codes mostly just picture an ideal, but do not give insight in tough considerations. In this article the authors show that different public values mentioned in codes are all worth pursuing as such, but that they in practice collide with each other. The manner in which administrators, managers and executives cope with such dilemmas, determines public opinion on good governance. Two cases have been researched: a municipality and a hospital. Through a Q-research six value patterns are demonstrated to exist in these cases. In addition (through interviews) the authors have discovered which values exactly collide in the cases, and which strategies are used to cope with collisions of values.

The Netherlands is engaged in reforming several of its public service provision sectors by limiting their hybrid (mixed public/private) character. This special issue deals with these reforms. We have a closer look at the systems of transport, education and housing, and also discuss reforms of the Dutch nation state. Each article poses three basic questions: why has the sector evolved as it has? Why is change seen as necessary? And how does this process take place? By doing so, we draw general lessons on how the Netherlands deals with system change and public management reform.

Many tasks will be decentralized to municipalities in the Netherlands in the coming years. To deal with these challenges, central government encourages municipal mergers, while municipalities often prefer a light form of cooperation. Since municipal boarders are converging less and less with the boarders inhabitants experience in their daily lives, municipalities feel free to cooperate in a variety of ways with other partners. This poses new challenges to democratic legitimacy, effectiveness and the role local authorities play. Local governments therefore do not need new regulations or legal forms of co-operations, but rather a repertoire fitting their role. We argue that local governments need to analyse their tasks, choose the form of cooperation that fits best and develop a repertoire for their cooperation. Light forms of cooperation are very important for developing a variety of cooperative forms and roles local governments need to play.

In policy practice sometimes organizational arrangements appear that at first glance manifest itself as cooperative relations between private organizations, but about which on second thoughts the question can be asked if after all there is an active input from the side of the government. This is for instance the case in the construction of biogas infrastructures. In this article the authors discuss if we can talk about PPC after all. In the debate on governance this question is important because in the design of PPC the public interest involved must be sufficiently guaranteed in terms of control and accountability. On the basis of a confrontation between the results of a literature review and an empirical study of the case of a Green Gas pipeline in North-East Friesland (‘Biogasleiding Noordoost Fryslân’) in the Netherlands, the authors conclude that public steering in practice can take a form in disguise. Using ‘intermediate’ civil law legal persons, governmental influence indeed can be and is exercised during the cooperation. Especially law poses specific demands on control and accountability to take care of public interests, like the promotion of the use of renewable energy. Likewise in this kind of projects, especially in comparison with pure private-private cooperation, the public and if possible even the public law regulation must be safeguarded, for instance by transparency of form and content of steering. Of course this has to be done with preservation of the cooperative nature that is typical of PPC.