Evaluations of EU legislation can fulfill a key role in the European policy process. They can provide the knowledge base required for political accountability towards the electorate, and form a basis for the improvement of existing legislation. This article introduces a research agenda in the realm of the ex-post evaluation of EU legislation, which comprises two research lines. The first strand comprises research into ex post legislative evaluations conducted by the European Commission. This research is innovative, because EU policy researchers so far have barely touched upon evaluation, as a final and important stage in the EU policy cycle. By assessing evaluation critically, we can ascertain to what extent the EU’s ex-post evaluation system is more than an instrument, aimed at increasing the EU’s legitimacy. The second research strand is own evaluation research, focusing on the role of European administrative networks- intergovernmental structures that have been established to improve the implementation of EU legislation by the member states. By critically evaluating the functioning and effectiveness of these networks, I hope to be able to find out whether and under what conditions these network structures are more, than the sum of their national parts.

With her chair in urban development management, Ellen van Bueren investigates policy, governance and management issues. Cities, as economic and cultural centres in our society, are major consumers of resources. They not only contribute to problems such as climate change, but also experience the risks and consequences thereof. Technological solutions to these problems are difficult to implement. They require larger-scale system changes, or encounter resistance. Making cities sustainable not only requires technical solutions, but also institutional innovation. A socio-technical-ecological system approach to cities shows the coherence and complexity of issues. Issues play on multiple scales, are cross-sectoral, and require an interaction of citizens, companies, and governments. Moreover, the playing field between these groups of actors is changing rapidly, technological empowerment in particular has made the citizen a much more equal player alongside the government and business. Existing instruments and approaches are not sufficient to approach sustainability issues. To identify and address these issues, cooperation between science and society is necessary. Multi- and transdisciplinary learning environments enable researchers and students to identify issues, to answer questions and to try out solutions together with stakeholders. Such environments are indispensable for the development of sustainable cities.

In his inaugural lecture entitled ‘From Pillars to Bubbles: The future of consensus governance in a globalized society’, Caspar van den Berg examines the consequences of economic and cultural globalization for the model of consensus governance that defined Dutch public administration for most of the 20th century. In doing so he presents an expansion and refinement of the Lijphartian model of consociationalism, and indicates which four factors supported consensus governance in the pillarized period, and how each of them has suffered erosion as globalization proceeded. It has become increasingly visible that globalization has differentiated effects for different groups in society, but also for different types of regions: booming regions benefit greatly from globalization, shrinking regions face major challenges. By combining recent insights from public administration, sociology, political science, economics and social geography, a new social order emerges, consisting of bubbles that are distinguished along socio-economic and territorial lines. These developments cause friction with regard to representation and decision-making at national, regional and local level. These are the themes on which the research within the Chair of Global and Local Governance will focus in the coming years.

Increasing demands and competing values force public organizations to introduce new organizational forms that veer away from rigid bureaucratic structures while remaining in control. How do public managers and their employees deal with the dilemmas that these decentralized and organic ways of organizing entail? On the one hand it must be prevented that public managers fall back too quickly on structures that rely on control and formalization, while, on the other hand, they themselves as managers are still primarily held accountable based on those bureaucratic principles. New organizational forms also assume that leadership is shared and distributed. This not only asks for a higher degree of self-management of employees, but also requires from formal leaders that such behavior is supported and encouraged. In our research and teaching on these changes in public organizations, we work closely with practice. That too is a matter of balancing, this time of public engagement with scientific independence.

This article presents the research program into governance in a knowledge society of professor Albert Meijer and colleagues at Utrecht University. The knowledge society is a society in which (1) citizens are higher educated that ever before and their level of education largely determines their societal position, (2) knowledge plays a key role in administrative and policy processes and is increasingly contested and (3) technology plays a key role in every facet of societal life. Research into governance of and in the knowledge society requires a transdisciplinary and plural approach to scientific work. Transdisciplinarity entails combining insights from science with various forms of contextual and practical knowledge. A plural approach to scientific works means that we should not only do explanatory empirical work but also theoretical, normative and prescriptive research. The overall ambition of this research program is to contribute to a democratic debate about the governance of the future.

Regulation and markets have become central steering mechanisms in modern states, but have received relatively little attention in public administration. This contribution argues that questions around regulation, monitoring and enforcement deserve more attention in public administration scholarship. It sketches the development of ‘Regulatory Governance’ as a scholarly field, and discusses the added value of a criminological perspective on relations between state and market. A research agenda on ‘naming and shaming’ brings these perspectives together.

The future is inherently uncertain. No certain statements can be made about the future. This means that policy and management always have to deal with long-term ‘future uncertainty’. However, it does matter how we name uncertainty; what words we use for it. What kind of uncertainty do we mean when we talk about uncertainty in policy processes and management? The same applies to the type of preparation for uncertainty that we choose. The question ‘are we prepared’ can also be answered in different ways. In this contribution we identify a variety of types of uncertainty and types of ways of dealing with uncertainty, based on the text of my Inaugural Speech delivered in 2016. I then discuss how these questions have been translated into research and education and which next steps I foresee for myself in the – although inherently uncertain – near future.

The work of Elinor Ostrom suggests that under certain conditions local communities are better able to sustainably manage so-called common pool resources than an external party such as government. In this article I explore whether and to what extent those conditions also apply to the governance of the Dutch welfare state. I show that in the current participation society there are numerous examples in which self-governance seems to be successful and in which Ostrom’s conditions seem to play an important role. On that basis, I come to the conclusion that citizens – under certain institutional conditions – may be better able to resolve social problems among themselves than through external interventions. This requires a shift from public administration to self-administration.

Public Administration as a scientific discipline can increase its scientific and social relevance if it takes a more design-oriented approach. With that I go back to the classical notion of Herbert Simon that public administration is a design science. I advocate revitalizing that idea. This is necessary if we look at the problems governments are struggling with, but also in view of the developments in the environment of our field. But it is also promising because it offers opportunities to achieve innovative, scientific knowledge. The design sciences contain numerous insights into how a public administration design process can be set up, with room for creativity, abduction and intuition. I divide a public design process into five rounds: the round of understanding the issue, defining or demarcating it, coming up with possible solutions, testing and refining these solutions and distilling the more generically applicable elements. This is ideally done through fast, iterative rounds of developing, testing and refining designs. In such a design process, disciplinary knowledge can play an important role in understanding the issue and coming up with possible designs. And so designing can also become a way to validate this knowledge.

For a long time, the three governance structures market, hierarchy, and community were regarded as separate entities. The market is based on the price mechanism, the authority mechanism is the basis of the hierarchy, and trust relations characterize the community. As the knowledge economy evolves, there is a shift in thinking about how these governance structures are related. Creating and sharing knowledge are key features of the knowledge economy. However, this knowledge is partly tacit and sharing knowledge is particularly useful among diverse organizations, which are two barriers for sharing of knowledge among organizations.
A new stream of literature suggests that the ability of organizations to combine the three governance structures contributes to their capacity to share knowledge with other organizations. Based on this literature, this article shows what kinds of organizational forms are possible. Besides that, it offer empirical example of the conditions under which these organizational forms evolve as well as how they contribute to organizational innovation.

Changing behavior is often necessary to tackle societal problems. Governments can change behavior via economic incentives (such as subsidies for electric cars), bans/mandates (such as prison sentences for drug smuggling), communication (for example information campaigns) and nudges (for example, being a donor by default). However, the government should not be a manipulator that applies the latest behavioral tricks without societal support. Public administration research shows that support cannot be taken for granted. If there is no support for behavioral change, well-intended interventions can even be counterproductive. I therefore develop a model for supported behavioral change. I provide five criteria that indicate when there is supported behavioral change: if the behavioral change is both effective (1) and efficient (2), and when there is support for behavioral change among politicians (3), among implementing organizations (4), and among citizens (5).

Singapore and the Netherlands are small, export- and trade-dependent countries that perform excellently in many areas, such as good governance and integrity, policy effectiveness, liveability, innovation, and e-government. At the same time there are clear differences in political culture and history: Singapore has a more authoritarian governance style including limitations in press freedom, freedom of speech, and political activism. Within these contrasting contexts, both countries have introduced and implemented similar public management reforms since the 1990s. The aim of these reforms is to maintain public service excellence in a dynamic environment but the countries make contrasting choices in achieving this aim. This article describes how administrative excellence is organised and pursued in Singapore and identifies five lessons for the Netherlands: (1) Use positive narratives about government often; (2) be nuanced about capping top-level remuneration; (3) enhance the attractiveness of government as an employer; (4) invest in life-long learning; (5) be an authoritative expert amidst horizontalisation hypes.

South Africa underwent an unprecedented transition in 1994. The country changed from the Apartheid regime into a system founded on the principles of the rule of law and equal treatment for all. Along with this political regime change, a wide range of social rights were included in the Constitution, which grants al citizens a constitutional right to a wide range of social services. Moreover, the system of governance and organisation of services was designed according to the latest insights from the then emerging new public management paradigm. Now, twenty years later, the system is crumbling; many of the basic services are not properly provided to citizens. Partly, this is a consequence of a basic absence of integrity in parts of the political class and in elements of the civil service. However, as we illustrate in a case analysis of the Water Boards in the Western Cape Province, the problem is also a consequence of the design of the system of governance. The combination of unlimited constitutional access to services and a stringent regime of new public management principles in the organisation of service provision has led to a serious crisis of performance. Therefore, the solution for the problem may be to redesign the system according to other governance principles, such as learning governance and networked governance.

In the past years, Flemish municipalities have been confronted with a plethora of new public management reforms. The two probably most salient reforms include the introduction of a strategic planning system entitled the policy and management cycle (PMC) as well as the provision of financial incentives for municipalities that undertake a merger. These reforms are not unique to the Flemish context. Indeed, similar reforms took place in the Netherlands, where policy and management instruments (PMI) – a strategic planning system – were introduced in the eighties and municipal mergers have been part of the political agenda for several decades. But similar reforms also took place in, for instance, the United Kingdom (i.e. the best value regime in 1999) as well as Denmark (i.e. the municipal mergers in 2007). In this essay, these Flemish reforms are critically evaluated, taking into account following question: which public values are triggered through these reforms, and what might this imply for the Flemish and Dutch local public sector? This essay uses new public governance principles such as strategic thinking and the learning organisation to answer this question.

In international comparative research, a dominant image often emerges of Denmark as a frontrunner in innovative governance, gaining top results in international rankings.
Based on four recent examples of national public reforms, this article studies the dynamics of reform implementation in Denmark, which can be characterised as expeditious and efficient. Three explanatory factors are discussed: a political, systemic and managerial factor. What is Denmark, a country in many ways similar to the Netherlands, doing differently? The article concludes that, for the Netherlands, the guiding element of Danish public reforms can be found not in the results of these reforms, but in the efficiency with which they are implemented.