A profession can be defined as a group of workers with shared knowledge, skills and quality standards. To maintain its professional status, the professional community needs to be relatively autonomous. However, while performing their tasks, many pressures jeopardize the professional worker’s autonomous position. Here, the professional community can make a difference.
Subordination to the political principal characterizes the position of the civil servant. What margin of professional independence do political leaders allow their civil servants? Recent academic empirical reports in the Netherlands show conflicting outcomes.
This essay describes how civil servants from a Dutch ministry deal with their professional standards and argues that, in the process of professionalization, more clarity is required with regard to how autonomy and independence for civil servants are safeguarded. This is especially relevant in a contemporary context where new ways to account for the professional behavior of civil servants need to be sought.

How far should governments go to keep their citizens safe? Not an easy question to answer, but the three books reviewed in this essay provide food for thought on this matter. Power (2004) describes how risk management could become such a dominant feature in today’s society while warning for the danger of risk management being misused to save one’s reputation if things do go wrong. Boutellier (2013) paints a picture of Dutch societal uncertainty and explains how crime became a part of Dutch risk society. According to Boutellier, Dutch government tries to deal with this complexity in an improvising manner. Van Duin, Wijkhuijs, and Jong (2013) present an edited volume of crises and incidents which happened in 2012. Lessons are drawn and warnings given, including the warning that it is impossible to prepare for all possible incidents, let alone plan everything ahead and distil those plans in rules and regulations.

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.