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.

This contribution gives an overview of the results of recent research into the role perception and the role behaviour of councillors. The research is the MAELG-survey (Municipal Assemblies in European Local Governance) carried out in 2007 and 2008 in 15 European countries and Israel. A special issue of Local Government Studies has been dedicated to this research. Three articles of this special issue are discussed intensively. These articles look at the role perception and the role behaviour of local councillors from the perspective of the tension between representative and participative democracy, the relation between participative democracy (also called citizen democracy) and the responsiveness of councillors and the influence of informal institutions on the representation style of local councils. Another recent article in Acta Politica looks specifically at the situation in Belgium. It is interesting that the authors do not apply the classic typology of representation styles (trustee and delegate), but an alternative typology (with delegation, responsiveness, authorization and accountability as four styles of representation) developed by the Dutch political scientists Andeweg and Thomassen.

Deze bijdrage gaat over goed opdrachtnemer/-geverschap bij beleidsgericht onderzoek in de gezondheidszorg. De constatering luidt dat de relatie tussen kennisvrager/opdrachtgever en kennisaanbieder/opdrachtnemer vaak spanningsvol is. Aan de hand van de werkpraktijk van kennisprogrammeur ZonMw wordt beschreven onder welke voorwaarden de kans op bruikbaarheid en gebruik van kennis zo groot mogelijk is. Daarbij geldt goede interactie tussen onderzoekers en kennisgebruikers in beleid of praktijk als de meest kritische succesfactor. In essentie komt goed opdrachtnemerschap neer op de gedragslijn: ken uw opdrachtgever; het gevraagde mag niet onbekend zijn. Goed opdrachtgeverschap komt in essentie neer op de complementaire gedragslijn: duidelijk formuleren wat je verlangt; het onbekende mag niet worden gevraagd.

Regulatory supervision and inspection have become key features of public governance, some authors even talk about the ‘audit society’ or the age of ‘regulatory capitalism’. Despite international research showing the importance of trust in supervisory relations, there is still a fierce debate about the role of trust in Dutch supervisory relations. Several inspectorates have incorporated trust as a central theme in their supervisory policy. This article describes the role of trust within the policy of the Dutch Healthcare Inspectorate (IGZ). This research addresses four themes in dealing with the concept of trust in supervisory relations: from transparency to accountability, from output performance to performance and risk management, from trust or control to trust and control, and, finally, a special regime for reliable inspectees. The empirical analysis in this paper contributes to the knowledge about the role of trust in supervision (policy) and to the debate about the role of trust in regulatory supervision policy.

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.

In the public as well as the semi-public sector numerous codes of good governance have been written. Although theses codes clearly lay down which public values must be the foundation of our administration, our newspapers often show examples of bad governance. It is striking that these codes mostly just picture an ideal, but do not give insight in tough considerations. In this article the authors show that different public values mentioned in codes are all worth pursuing as such, but that they in practice collide with each other. The manner in which administrators, managers and executives cope with such dilemmas, determines public opinion on good governance. Two cases have been researched: a municipality and a hospital. Through a Q-research six value patterns are demonstrated to exist in these cases. In addition (through interviews) the authors have discovered which values exactly collide in the cases, and which strategies are used to cope with collisions of values.

Achter opdrachtresearch gaat de veronderstelling schuil dat de tussen- en eindresultaten van beleidsonderzoek vroeg of laat ook benut worden en onderdeel worden van een proces van bezinning op beleid. Dit artikel handelt hierover. Diverse aspecten van benutting van onderzoek komen aan bod, zoals de definitie en vormen van benutting. Er worden vier richtingen onderscheiden om de omvang en vorm van benutting of onderbenutting op te sporen. Het artikel geeft voorts verklaringen voor achterblijvende benutting en bevat adviezen om te komen tot meer benutting. Voor ambtenaren, bestuurders en partners in beleidsnetwerken biedt deze beschouwing aanknopingspunten om researchresultaten desgewenst beter te benutten. En voor onderzoekers bevat dit artikel tal van aanzetten tot hypothesevorming voor verder onderzoek.

Dit artikel bevat een uitvoerige samenvatting en een beoordeling van een nieuw boek van Furubo, Rist en Speer met als (in het Nederlands vertaalde) titel: ‘Evaluatie in turbulente tijden. Reflecties op een discipline in verwarring’. De aanleiding voor dit boek is dus de opvatting dat de meeste politieke en bestuurlijke contexten voor beleidsevaluatie zo sterk in beweging zijn geraakt dat ex-post beleidsevaluatie als discipline en vanzelfsprekend onderdeel van het proces van beleidsondersteuning in crisis is geraakt en bedreigd wordt. In het kort geeft dit boek als antwoord op deze dreiging: relativeer het ideaal van ‘evidence-based’ beleid, en ga voor ‘real-time’ evaluatie; verleg uw aandacht van ex-post evaluatie ten behoeve van verantwoording achteraf naar ex-ante evaluatie tijdens de beleidsformulering en ex-durante evaluatie parallel aan de beleidsimplementatie, met als doelen: ‘early warning’, beleidsleren, en flexibel reageren op snel veranderende omstandigheden. Natuurlijk heeft dat gevolgen voor rolopvattingen en taakverdelingen in de procesarchitectuur van het beleidsproces.

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.

In policy practice sometimes organizational arrangements appear that at first glance manifest itself as cooperative relations between private organizations, but about which on second thoughts the question can be asked if after all there is an active input from the side of the government. This is for instance the case in the construction of biogas infrastructures. In this article the authors discuss if we can talk about PPC after all. In the debate on governance this question is important because in the design of PPC the public interest involved must be sufficiently guaranteed in terms of control and accountability. On the basis of a confrontation between the results of a literature review and an empirical study of the case of a Green Gas pipeline in North-East Friesland (‘Biogasleiding Noordoost Fryslân’) in the Netherlands, the authors conclude that public steering in practice can take a form in disguise. Using ‘intermediate’ civil law legal persons, governmental influence indeed can be and is exercised during the cooperation. Especially law poses specific demands on control and accountability to take care of public interests, like the promotion of the use of renewable energy. Likewise in this kind of projects, especially in comparison with pure private-private cooperation, the public and if possible even the public law regulation must be safeguarded, for instance by transparency of form and content of steering. Of course this has to be done with preservation of the cooperative nature that is typical of PPC.