This essay reports on an academic self-examination of the functioning of the Review committee on district approach. By assessing statistics, investigating problem areas, holding organized meetings with stakeholders, and having spontaneous visits, the committee tried to find out how things really are. This raised the question of whether the picture of reality that they obtained was really better in terms of being truer and more real? Accessing true reality is an understandable ambition for contributing to the quality of policy and implementation, but one that comes from a tragic (because it is ultimately unrealizable) desire. The experiences were always open to interpretation.
After that, the committee had to find a way to convey its findings to the political and social arena where they could be discussed and exploited. At this stage, the committee’s report was a truth in itself. Finishing the report had to prompt a follow-up in the social and political arena by, in turn, reviewing how to take away from the encountered reality to a sufficient extent.
The search for true reality yielded valuable catch on that belief in a truer reality behind the presented truth image is gone. By participating in administrative reality, those investigating seek the truth. But they do so in a context that is not looking for the truth.

This article shows how top officials in ten European countries evaluate changes in the public sector based on a number of dimensions, such as quality, cost-efficiency, ethics, effectiveness and the attractiveness of the public sector as an employer. Senior public officials in the Netherlands are compared to their counterparts from 9 other European countries. The study is based on the large-scale academic COCOPS Top Executive Survey, and answers from 3,173 top public sector officials were used.
Results show that senior public officials in the Netherlands are very positive about changes in cost-efficiency and service quality in the public sector. Yet they are concerned about the attractiveness of the public sector as an employer and public trust in government. At the same time, senior public officials in the Netherlands appear to be among the most positive all nationalities about recent changes in how the public sector operates. Only with regard to changes in the attractiveness of the public sector as an employer are senior Dutch public officials considerably less optimistic.

In co-production processes, citizens and professionals both contribute to the provision of public services and try to enhance the quality of the services they produce. Although government offers several opportunities for co-production, not all citizens decide to actually take part. Current insights in citizens’ individual motivations offered by the co-production literature are limited. In this article, we integrate insights from different streams of literature to build a theoretical model that explains citizens’ motivations to co-produce. We test the model using empirical data of Dutch neighborhood watches.

Public regulators and inspectorates are increasingly involved in self-regulatory initiatives. This contribution is about co-regulation, which are co-ordination efforts among public regulators and self-regulating institutions. In co-regulation arrangements typical regulation and oversight activities, such as standard setting, information gathering and sanctioning become subjects of co-ordination between public and private actors. Co-regulation arrangements are typically network efforts. At the same time ‘regulation’ has a hierarchical connotation. This paradox shows in interpretations of ‘governance’ and ‘the move from government to governance’, the latter being a popular phrase qualifying a change of the government’s role in society. Main question in this paper is what the changing role of government in society means for the assessment of co-regulation. Based on literature two implicit, but opposing interpretations of ‘governance’ and the change are described. This implicitness may cause unsound assessments of co-regulation, either too tough or too lenient. In this contribution the normative implications of both interpretations are made explicit for co-regulation. The argument is illustrated by the case of co-regulation in the Dutch coach travel industry.