In dit artikel wordt het evaluatieonderzoek van overheidsbeleid kritisch onder de loep genomen. De auteur bespreekt vier alternatieven: responsieve en multipele evaluatie, argumentatieve evaluatie, netwerkgericht evalueren en lerend evalueren. De bevindingen kunnen positief inwerken op het ‘leren van evalueren’ in organisaties.

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.

Dutch local government is more and more regarded as a ‘first government’. Vision documents of the association of municipalities and national policy plans stress the importance of local government for improving public governance. This ‘new localism’ builds upon two conflicting perspectives to local government: the modernization model and the political community model. As a result, local governments are becoming overloaded by many new and conflicting demands. A debate about how both perspectives to the ‘first government’ can be balanced, is therefore needed.

The reform of the Dutch welfare state is an ongoing process, that jumpstarted in the early 1980s. We chart demographic trends and prospects for economic growth up to year 2025. Our search for options to strenghten the economic base of the welfare state leads on to a discussion of tax-benefit measures to increase labour participation and to incentivise part-timeworkers to accept fulltime jobs. We conclude that, all in all, by 2025 the number of workers in de Dutch economy will not differ significantly from the current size of the labour force, whereas the scope to improve labour productivity seems to be limited. Given these limits to the prospects for future economic growth – even with the standard pension age at 67 years, planned to be in force as from 2021 –, our economy will have to support at least half a million more pensioners and an as yet unknown additional number of elderly unemployed and disabled. It follows, that further reforms of the social security system of the Netherlands can be expected, as public sector outlays claim currently already half of national output.

The key question of this study is whether policies adopted elsewhere in Europe might be useful in helping to increase the labour force participation of women and of older workers in the Netherlands, and thus improve the financial basis for social security arrangements. We examined the effectiveness of national policy measures over and above that of the individual-level determinants that are traditionally examined in economic and sociological studies. The data on labour force participation are from the European Social Survey, and information on public policy arrangements comes from the MULTILINKS database. Regarding the labour force participation of women, findings show the importance of distinguishing financial measures and care services. Women generally work fewer hours per week in countries with generous financial support for families (tax benefits, child support), and more hours in countries with generous parental leaves. Regarding the participation of older workers, findings show the importance of distinguishing the minimum pension level (negative association with the likelihood of having a job) and pension as a proportion of earned wage (no association with having a job). A novelty of the present study is its ability to demonstrate the impact of national arrangements at the level of individual participation behaviour.

Samenvatting:
Het artikel beschrijft een onderzoek dat de auteur heeft verricht naar de relatie tussen ongeschreven regels en de mate van openheid in de beleidsontwikkeling.
Daarbij is openheid geoperationaliseerd in 'wie je betrekt' en 'hoe je partijen betrekt'.
Belangrijke ongeschreven regels die werden gevonden, zijn:

• Besef, we dienen hier de Minister (en de lijn)!

• Wees zichtbaar naar de lijn toe.

• Haal je tijdsplanning!

• Je netwerk is cruciaal!

Reflection and Debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

‘Green gas’ is a sustainable alternative to natural gas. It is produced by converting biomass into biogas, which can consequently be upgraded to natural gas standards. Expectations about green gas are high. According to the long term vision of Netbeheer Nederland, the representative association of gas grid operators, green gas will entail 50 percent of the domestic gas mixture by 2050. In line with this vision national government has adopted a green gas innovation support program. Production of green gas takes place in rural areas with abundant supply of organic production resources, especially manure. It is in demonstration projects that green gas niche development is to be proven. In this paper the central question is how green gas demonstration projects manifest at the local level. By conducting a stakeholder analysis, we take a ‘bottom-up’ research approach, which helps us to identify organizational and institutional barriers key local stakeholders have in relation to green gas demonstration projects. We judge this necessary to further understanding in green gas niche development. The results of the analysis are used to advice policymakers about design and use of policy instruments which can help to solve these barriers.

In the Chronicle of a recent policy trend Gjalt de Graaf and Albert Meijer discuss how the new network society influences public administration by exploring a specific case of how citizens are aiming to bring their resigned mayor back in office by a social media campaign.

Based on the experience of citizens initiatives in Antwerpen (Belgium), Dortmund (Germany) and Rotterdam (the Netherlands), this article explores the roles of citizens in these projects. The initiatives were not started by already active citizens, but by inactive citizens who were triggered to take action by an event in their direct surroundings. The cases studied show that many small, simple and everyday strategies, which are often overlooked by researchers, are meaningful for successful citizenship. The will to participate is not so much ideologically or democratically driven, but driven by a perceived practical need for action. Governments should aim to support and facilitate these initiatives without aiming to canalize these activities according to their own political or democratic rationality.

The report Confidence in Citizens by the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy dominantly supports increased room for citizen participation. Based on many examples, the report shows how society benefits from the many citizens’ initiatives and how government interference can hamper or even obstruct these initiatives, which do not fit the logic of civil servants. The report gives four, rather general suggestions of how policy makers could respond to these citizens’ initiatives. The generic character of these recommendations can be ascribed to a weak problem analysis and a biased understanding of how government actions negatively interfere with citizens’ initiatives. The Council could have asked more critical questions with regards to citizens initiatives and how they should respond to the logic of government.

Amidst the turbulence of recent crises, governments’ capacity to govern and to deliver public value is under serious pressure. Public institutions are working hard to come up with new and improved schemes for dealing with complex and wicked policy issues that have emerged or just wont go away. But government alone cannot solve most of these issues. Governments already attempted to make ‘better, smarter policy’ in the hopes of raising performance. They also invested heavily in ‘participation’ of citizens, by inviting them to ‘co-create’ policy or ‘join-up’ with government agencies. However, this image of collaboration is one-sided. Besides the efforts initiated by governments themselves, there is a wide array of emerging activities. In these practices, it is not the government that takes action, but society takes ‘public matters’ into its own hands. Just as in many other countries, in The Netherlands groups of citizens have started to organize certain services, tasks or activities that used to be provided by the central or decentralized governmental institutions by themselves (and in most cases, for themselves). This article conceptualizes these emerging practices and analyses how they affect the world of policy making and what they may mean for public administration research.

The involvement of citizens in discussions about policy arrangements has been growing in the past decades. These forums of decision-making often provoke criticism because of a so-called ‘lack of representativeness’. Often a small group of active citizens takes the lead and decides which problems have to be dealt with. Some active residents primarily focus on improving the neighbourhood, regardless of whether their activities have everyone’s consent. This raises many questions related their representativeness. Do these participants form an adequate cross-section of the population? Are they speaking on behalf of others? Maybe passive citizens feel fine with the opinions of active citizens and agree that a small group of citizens is taking the lead. In this paper these active citizens are viewed as ‘trustees’: informal representatives who take responsibility to look after the neighbourhood’s interests, expecting that passive residents would support their efforts. The paper has two central questions: First, which ideas do active participants have about representation and representativeness? Second, in what respects can active citizens be characterized as ‘trustees’? In the theoretical part we contend that the notion ‘trustee’ may function as a theoretical framework to understand present-day citizen participation. In local policy networks many informal representatives express views and interests that are recognizable for many citizens. They are trusted, as long as their activities can be checked. The second part of the paper focuses on three projects of citizen decision-making within local safety policies (The Dutch cities Amsterdam, Deventer and Rotterdam). Within these projects, participants prioritize what kinds of activities and interventions police officers and other frontline workers should carry out. A main finding is that many active citizens function as contact persons who are continuously available for other residents. They do not wish to speak ‘on behalf’ of others but they are bestowed – often reluctantly – with the role of representative, as they demonstratively express neighborhood interests (‘clean, intact and safe’). Their reputation seems to be decisive.

According to the advocates of the New Politics thesis youngsters are generally less interested in general elections, but are rather attracted by citizen-initiated referendums that are inspired by ecological, elite-challenging and pro-social motives. However, other scholars contend that the age-related differences that characterize participation in general elections are more or less universal because what really matters is how much is at stake. Yet, maybe a middle ground can be found between both perspectives if one explicitly takes into account the conditional nature of the New Politics theoretical framework. Based on exit-poll data regarding participation and vote choice in a Belgian citizen-initiated referendum in three different local contexts we test these conditional hypotheses. Our findings reveal that consistent with the New Politics thesis youngsters participate more and prefer pro-ecology, elite-challenging, and pro-social issue-frames, but only in ‘low stakes-contexts’ where no NIMBY-interests are at play.