This article describes and explains the development of the regional construct for the coordination of medical assistance in accidents and disasters, the emergency medical services in the region (GHOR), in the Netherlands in the period 1996 to 2020. The authors distinguish four stages of organisational development, which they analyse from a multi-actor perspective consisting of three elements: the impact of disasters and (negative) evaluations, the institutional context and the bureaucratic battle surrounding the GHOR. The GHOR was a solution for a perceived insufficiently coordinated functioning of all parties involved in medical assistance. The GHOR was positioned in a complex way. This made it predictable that the multidisciplinary GHOR process would gradually be integrated within the ‘nearby’ regular mono-disciplinary acute care process and the structures for it. This article gives policymakers involved in disaster and crisis management more insight into the history and development of the GHOR over the last two decades. This insight is important now that the added value of the GHOR has come under discussion, partly due to the doubts of the Evaluation Committee for the Security Regions Act, and decisions about its future have to be taken. For administrative scientists, this case study shows that public administration’s ability to foresee and break through known organisational development patterns is still inadequate.

How did Flemish and Dutch mayors experience the first months of the corona crisis? To find out, the Flemish and Dutch authors of this article first zoom in on the local government system of Flanders (Belgium) and the Netherlands in which these mayors operate. That system differs between the Low Countries from a functional, territorial and political perspective. However, a thorough document analysis and a series of interviews teach us that the position and leeway of mayors is quite similar in full corona time and during the corona struggle. Crisis decision-making is centralised in both Flanders and the Netherlands. Mayors therefore quickly made a significant shift in terms of (1) power and authority (respectively to the provincial governor and the federal level and to the regional mayor and the national level); (2) tasks (prioritising crisis management over other tasks); and (3) roles (increased importance for the executive role with impact on the ‘mayor father’ or ‘mayor mother’ role). And, with that, this contribution shows that Flemish and Dutch mayors, and if they are extended, local authorities, are indispensable for these days tackling a crisis, even if it extends far beyond their own borders.

In 2020 and 2021 there were many examples of manifestations and disturbances in the Netherlands in which social media played an important role. On a number of occasions, fights were fought in the physical world that originated in the online world, for example from the drill rap scene. The increase in victims of digital crime also became apparent. During this period, a number of Dutch mayors came to the media with a clear message that they wanted more options/powers to respond to this. Previous research has shown that mayors cannot use powers online, but they can maintain order in other ways. Students from NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences (in Leeuwarden) therefore conducted an exploratory study in the autumn of 2020, in collaboration with the Cybersafety research group, into the practical possibilities and (political) views with regard to administrative law options: a digital restraining order. In this contribution, attention is paid to the question of whether a digital version of the physical restraining order as a formal authority of mayors can contribute to the prevention of disturbances of public order that have their source in the online world.

Local political parties are clearly on the rise in the Netherlands in both the municipal council and the municipal board. Their average percentage of council seats increased from 25% in 1998 to 37% in 2018 and the percentage of councillors from 21% to 32%. This coincided with a greatly increased fragmentation. For example, the average number of political parties on the council rose from 6.5 in 1998 to 8.0 in 2018 and the number of parties providing one or more aldermen increased from 2.8 to 3.4 during this period. Fragmentation expressed in the number of effective parties shows a similar trend. If we use the Chapel Hill score, it appears that the average political colour of both the municipal council and the alderman part in the municipal board has shifted to the right. This is mainly because political parties are becoming increasingly right wing according to this index and not so much because there are more local votes for right-wing parties. Significant differences in the representative representation are also noted. The local parties as well as the Socialist Party (SP) are less successful than average in converting their seats on the council into councillor seats, while the three large traditional (and especially the CDA) and smaller Christian parties have succeeded above average in this.

The history of local parties in the Netherlands is quite a mystery. Since their first appearance at the dawn of the twentieth century, local parties were founded sooner or later in all municipalities. They seemed to have served as an addition to local representatives of national parties. Despite the variety in their ideologies, shapes and modi operandi, they could be qualified and studied as ‘niche parties’, offering an alternative to the viewpoints and divisions of the traditional (national) party politics. With this article, the authors aim to contribute to a better understanding of Dutch local parties, whose origins and development have largely remained a black box due to the scarcity of sources and studies. They do so by adopting a partly quantitative, partly qualitative or narrative approach, while looking at the election results of local parties in the past century, including salient regional differences, and by comparing these to the success of national parties in local elections. Within the boundaries of their research, their hypothesis seems to hold true that the popularity of local parties, as ‘niche parties’, depended largely on the strategies of national parties, which justifies the assumption that these two types of parties have acted as communicating vessels.

In this study, the authors analyse the development of the 46 Dutch local parties that received at least ten per cent of the vote in the 2014 municipal elections as a new party. The aim is to determine which factors are most relevant to the successful entry and survival of this group of parties. To this end, they conduct interviews with leaders of these parties, but also, for comparison, with the leaders of parties who failed to win a seat. An important common feature of the most successful local parties is that they express dissatisfaction with local politics in an appealing way and offer voters perspective. They do this by putting people on the list who are known in the small communities and who are actively involved. The following factors are present in varying compositions among the parties that even exceeded their election victory four years later: unity in the party or at least no ‘hassle’ visible to society, visible and appealing to residents, having clearly achieved something and being able to transmit that to society. Most founders of the most successful newcomers were previously politically active for a local branch of a political party. It is also striking that three quarters of the most successful newcomers come from municipalities with a maximum of 40,000 inhabitants.

Local political parties are an important factor in local politics in the Netherlands. These parties, which participate in municipal elections but are not affiliated with national political parties, are currently the largest ‘political family’ in the municipal councils. Yet surprisingly little is known about these parties. The existing research indicates that this ‘party family’ has a protest character. But at the same time, more precise analyses indicate that this party family is more diverse: and that the label ‘local party’ describes all kinds of different movements. However, a comprehensive analysis of the programmatic positioning of all parties in this family in relation to national parties is lacking. That is the purpose of this article. For this research, all election manifestoes of the departments and parties that participated in the municipal elections in November 2013, March and November 2014, November 2017 and March and November 2018 were collected. On this basis, the positions of all these parties are estimated on the left-right dimension, a scale that measures anti-elitist rhetoric and a scale that measures localism, based on modern quantitative text analysis techniques (bag-of-words approaches). In this way, for the first time, a picture is obtained of the programmatic cohesion and diversity of this party family as a whole.

Dutch water boards are commonly viewed as important player in making the Netherlands climate-proof, resonating in calls to transform water boards into ‘climate boards’. Upcoming legislative changes (i.e. the Environment and Planning Act) stress the importance of integrated approaches, emphasizing spatial quality and collaboration. Dutch water boards are therefore in a strategic repositioning process, in which the relation to the spatial planning domain stands central. The institutions’ adaptation process started already in the 1990s, yet the urgency of the current climate crisis makes it more pressing. However, strategic repositioning might be hampered due to the corona crisis. An acute crisis can absorb all attention and thereby impede a long-term transition. The question is, though, if this also applies to the water boards, as they do not have a primary responsibility in combatting Covid-19. Based on a framing analysis of strategic position papers and interviews with water board employees, we shed light on this repositioning process by identifying the water boards’ new ‘mission mystique’ and accompanying opportunities and dilemmas. We conclude that water boards remain rather cautious in living up to their new mission of a proactive partner in integrated planning; they could use their strong reputation as water authorities to act more courageous in climate-related spatial planning decisions.

As public institutions seek to come to grips with the crisis of COVID-19, they risk getting trapped in a unilateral here-and-now crisis management style that overlooks other long-term societal issues. We raise the question how and why this is the case. What makes here-and-now crisis management so ‘attractive’ from a political-administrative perspective? Through which strategies is this style being promoted? Guided by the literature on blame management, we empirically analyze the Dutch COVID-19 crisis communication. We specifically zoom into a pivotal yet underexposed facet: the role of time. Three time-related blame management strategies are empirically explored and interpreted: 1) playing with the time horizon; 2) organizing self-reinforcing institutional rhythms of monitoring and decision-making; 3) selectively naming uncertainties and risks. All three subtly add to a short time horizon in managing the ­COVID-19 crisis, revealing how interwoven time and blame are in public decision-making.

Addressing a creeping crisis like climate change requires nothing less than a system transition. A system transition is very complex and hence its success depends to a large extent on feedback effects: mechanisms where an initial change reinforces itself or balances itself out. Urgent crises are more salient than creeping crises. However, it is possible to combine policies for both urgent and creeping crises, as can be seen in policies that aim for a green recovery. In this article, we conclude that up till now such policies have overlooked the relevance of feedback effects. We provide examples of corona recovery measures that simultaneously help to establish a system transition through feedback effects.

The government strives for a low-carbon energy supply, sustainable agriculture and a circular economy. These transitions require a long-term orientation, while the long term is surrounded by deep uncertainty. This challenge poses two dilemmas for public knowledge institutions such as PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. First, they should pay more attention to the unpredictability of the future, while policymakers expected them to make the future more predictable. Second, they should support the use of foresight more, while policymakers operate in a context that discourages this. The dilemmas require that the knowledge institutions make more work of speculation, that they actively organise the use of foresight and that they seek to connect with formal policy processes. While doing this it’s important that the knowledge institutions maintain their core values of scientific excellence, policy orientation and independence and also propagate this.

Do the budgetary consequences of an acute crisis make us less willing to tackle long-term challenges? This paper asks whether the recent ­COVID-19 crisis has affected the willingness of parties to commit to so-called ‘policy investments’. These are policies where short-term costs are accepted in anticipation of higher benefits in the longer run. Theoretically, there is no unambiguous prediction as to whether the recent crisis plays a role in repositioning party preferences regarding policy investments. In light of this theoretical ambiguity, this article aims to provide an empirical answer by measuring and comparing party positioning regarding policy investments of Dutch parties during the two general elections for the House of Representatives (Tweede Kamerver­kiezingen) of 2017 and 2021 respectively. To identify which proposals qualify as policy investments, and measure the corresponding willingness to engage in them, the article builds on calculations of the budgetary impact of party manifestos provided by the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (Centraal Planbureau; Keuze in Kaart). The subsequent analysis shows that overall willingness of parties to engage in policy investments has increased during the COVID-19 crisis; suggesting that the tension between addressing short- and long-term challenges is less strict that often suggested.

In this feature authors discuss recent research findings that are of interest to readers of Beleid en Maatschappij.

The Dutch public sector wants to become more diverse and inclusive, which seems necessary for the legitimacy and confidence of the government. This explorative study took place within two Dutch national government departments and shows how scientific insights into diversity and inclusion are reflected in government practice. Four results can be derived from this study: (1) The sense of urgency around diversity and inclusion has a stimulating effect, but the embedding of the theme into both departments deserves attention. (2) There is a wealth of perspectives and interventions, but hardly any attention to the connection with society. (3) The themes of leadership and inclusion should be higher on the agenda. (4) Psychological security determines an inclusive culture.
Important conclusions and recommendations are:
- Formulate a clear vision of diversity and inclusion, and involve the entire organisation in the approach.
- Strengthen an inclusive culture, and invest in inclusive leadership.
- Promote diversity at the top of the organisation.

Notably, the influx of diversity in the workforce is still the priority of many public organisations. However, the flow and retention of these employees needs more attention. There lies an important task for executives. These conclusions and recommendations form a basis for organisations that want to move forward with policies and interventions on diversity and inclusion.

Policy makers who work on sustainability transitions are well informed by transition science. As many scientific disciplines transition science comprises several theories and schools of thought, with distinct concepts and logical frames. The implication is that we can distinguish – subtle and implicit – different normative assumptions about, e.g., role of government, theory of social change, object of policy and issues of power. Such normative assumptions could then translate into policy, often without a proper assessment. This article aims to make such normative assumptions in transition theories more explicit. I explore how these normative elements translate into actual transition policy in a case of Dutch policy for ‘regional energy strategies’. Revealing normative elements in transition policy (or any policy field) can help policy makers to avoid pitfalls of conceptual cherry picking, thus contributing to transition policy that is scientifically and normatively robust.

In this feature authors discuss recent research findings that are of interest to readers of Beleid en Maatschappij.

In the Netherlands, the first period of the fight against the corona virus, which lasted from March, 1 until December 1, 2020, can be seen as a unique experiment. During this period, the 25 chairs of the ‘safety regions’ (veiligheidsregio’s), who are simultaneously the major of an important municipality in their region, were authorized for the first time to issue the most essential measures to tackle a national health crisis, partly on the binding advice of the Dutch health minister. The chairs of the safety regions gathered in the so-called ‘safety convention’ (veiligheidsberaad), in which they aimed to nationally coordinate their respective local measures. In this paper, we argue that the involvement of the safety regions provided a structure in which all local office holders in their respective regions (both on the municipal and the safety region level) could co-operate in the nation-wide fight against the pandemic, while at the same time take into account the existing (cultural) differences between the 25 regions.

Despite the highest ranks on pandemic preparedness assessments European welfare states encounter great difficulty in responding effectively to the COVID-19 outbreak. In this article we compare the governance of COVID-19 response in 48 Eurasian countries and a selection of European and SARS (2003) exposed Asian countries during the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak until 1 June 2020, using data from the COVID-19 Health System Response Monitor and the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, recent scientific literature and policy documents.
Pandemic preparedness during the first wave of COVID-19 evolved from specialist infectious disease control to a broad governance of population mitigation, which in at least half of Eurasian countries lacked appropriate authority and capacity. In the directly operational response in Asian countries, preparedness encompasses a whole of government approach, an engaged and active community and private actors. Preparedness requires and reflects both vertical and horizontal coordination as well as policies that fit with the political economy of a country and region.