While the international community tries to picture what the future of Belgium as a country will be, the different regions (Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels) deal with issues of territorial governance like amalgamations, the future of provinces, city-regions and intergovernmental collaboration. The article maps these issues, but also which facts, interests and arguments are brought to the table, and to what extent policy agendas in the three regions are similar or not. In Wallonia and Flanders, the existence of the provincial tier is questioned and intermunicipal collaboration should become more important. Amalgamation of municipalities is discussed openly in Flanders - with little success so far, while such a debate is absent in Wallonia. The authors zoom in on the debate in Flanders, showing how rich the landscape of intergovernmental and public-private collaboration is, which variations exist, how each policy sector creates and protects its ‘own’ regional turf, how political debate on ‘cleaning up the mess of regional organisations’ requires nuancing, and how the Belgian political culture shapes that sectoral regional landscape. The authors build on two regional mappings, combining descriptive information with input from the interactive processes with different stakeholders on issues of efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability.

The co-production possibilities brought on by web 2.0 has meant that media are no longer a one-way stream, with citizens as passive consumers of information. This has also had an impact on the way public organizations account for their actions. In this article we describe Open Data and various other emerging forms of dynamic accountability which in recent years have cropped up alongside the more traditional horizontal and vertical accountability mechanisms. Dynamic accountability uses the technical possibilities of web 2.0 to put an end to accountability as a one-way stream: citizens now have the possibility to react and actively hold their government to account. We reflect on this emerging trend by exploring which questions this raises for Dutch governmental organizations.

Before 2010, the Netherlands Antilles were an autonomous country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This structure was often cited as a barrier to effective governance and led to calls for the ablishment of the Netherlands Antilles. This article examines whether this step has led to good governance in the case of the new country of Curaçao. The author comes to the conclusion that political culture has a bigger effect on good governance than institutional arrangements.

Good governance takes a central role in development policy. A considerable amount of development aid is used to support anti-corruption initiatives, democratisation, or the improvement of public administration. The number of governance indicators has grown tremendously, and these indicators appear to play an ever more important role in aid allocation. These indicators, however, are not value-free and reflect a certain view of good governance, one that is furthermore changing continuously. In this article, we first use the ever-expanding literature to explore how donors define ‘good governance’, and how it is measured. We subsequently analyse whether good governance really matters for development. Finally, we look at international experiences with good governance promotion, and the value tensions inherent to this process.

In this literature review we present and discuss the key concepts of this symposium issue: (good) governance, (public) values, and the management of tensions between public values. The article concludes with an overview of strategies on how to deal with public values as a prelude to the remainder of the symposium, and discusses the implications of the distinguished strategies for public administration practice.