While the Netherlands has been a globally leading country in the area of agrofood for the latter half of the 20th century, its chances to maintain that position will co-depend on its capacity to develop its primary sector into more sustainable directions. This is no trivial task. For a long time, strong institutional arrangements provided guidance to practices of governance, consumption, production and innovation in line with a productivist paradigm. Although these arrangements have been significantly destabilized, and novel ones are emerging, a mature institutional landscape, tailored to a more sustainable development, has not yet fleshed out.
This article asks the question how innovative practices deal with this ambiguous and dynamic institutional context. It does so through investigating how, over about a decade, two sets of practices to promote more sustainable development (in the fields of livestock systems and greenhouse horticulture), draw on (remains of) incumbent arrangements, and novel institutional elements to provide normative guidance and mobilize resources (money; knowledge; legitimacy). Theoretically, it thus contributes to (1) understanding the emergence of novel modes of governance in an institutional void, (2) taking into account and extending it to a dynamic context, the paradox of embedded agency.

This article presents a comparative analysis of the news coverage on the euro crisis in Flanders (Dutch-speaking Belgium) and the Netherlands. The aim of the research was to identify how newspapers in the Low Countries have portrayed the roots of the crisis, the main victims, and those held responsible to solve the crisis, and ways to do so. This study also analyzed the differences across geographical contexts and types of newspapers. Furthermore, it examined how the coverage changed as the crisis continued. Research findings include that Flemish newspapers more often reported about the causes of the crisis, whereas the Dutch newspapers published more articles discussing the responses to it. Furthermore, financial newspapers provided more news stories searching for a solution, while popular newspapers usually published short, factual descriptions.

Studies of second-order elections using aggregate data have predominantly focused on examining the extent to which European parliament elections and regional elections are dominated by the national, first-order arena, and paid scarce attention to the analysis of municipal elections. In addition the study of second-order elections is dominated by looking at the impact of first-order factors whilst ignoring the impact of arena-specific factors. This article addresses these shortcomings by analyzing the impact of national and local factors on the performance of national parties in the Dutch municipal elections of 2010. Our analysis shows that there are significant effects of local factors. Most parties lose votes when having been in local government and in some cases as well when having in addition lost an alderman as a result of a political crisis. Parties also lose vote share as a result of the entrance of new national and local parties in a local election, with the effect of new national entrants being larger than that of new local entrants. Our analysis corroborates earlier findings that point to a dominance of national factors, while at the same time showing that it is vital to include local, arena specific factors in order to get to a better estimation of the second-orderness of non-national elections. We discuss our results with respect to the recurring debate about the nationalisation of the Dutch municipal elections.