Scale is one of the classic themes in the study of Public Administration. Despite much research and debate, a lot of questions remain open. This special issue introduces scale sensitive governance as an alternative concept. It relates to taking into account the context, departing from dogma's or illusions about the ideal scale, and looking for new ways to deal with issues of scale.

There seems to be a contradiction between what is happening in public administration discipline and public administration practice. Whereas public administration discipline and law largely separated during the past decades public administration practice and law have converged. Recently three books have been published which emphasize the importance of the rule of law as an explanatory variable for public administration's design and behavior. In this review essay these books are discussed from a public administration theory perspective. The point of departure of the authors substantially differs. Beckett (‘Public Management and the Rule of Law’, 2010) focuses on the rule of law, Cooper (‘Public Law & Public Administration’, 2007) and Rosenbloom, O'Leary & Chanin (‘Public Administration and Law’, 2010) aim at constitutionalizing public administration. The rule of law and the constitution prove to be shaky grounds for a public administration theory. In general constitutional competence may be important for public managers and professionals, but what it means for everyday practices is not easy to establish. The authors therefore extensively describe American public law, emphasizing the constitutional constraints and general administrative law. With these books the authors provide excellent building blocks for a comparative approach of the rule of law from a public administration perspective. The aim of such an approach would be to discover patterns between legal and constitutional designs on the one hand and everyday administrative practices on the other hand.

In the Netherlands there is an ongoing discussion on the preferred or even necessary scale of government. Basic assumption in this decades-long discussion is that the mere seize of government affects the functioning and quality of government. This article questions that specific assumption, by applying two criteria; government performance and democratic legitimacy. It is concluded that the supposed relationship between seize and quality hardly exists, theoretically nor empirically. Recent government proposals for further up-scaling are being critically assessed. Main conclusion is that thinking in terms of scale and seize is no longer feasible in a modern network society.

There is no world government for sustainability, whereas many of todays' sustainability issues are of a global scale. This paradox explains the rise of global, often private, partnerships to develop principles and criteria for sustainability. The central theme of this article is the relationship between global partnerships and national governments in governing sustainability. Are these global partnerships an excuse for governments not to take the lead in organizing sustainable palm oil, or do they activate governments to take up their public responsibilities? Is there synergy, coordination or rather competition between these different agents and scales of governance? The case is about the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and its relationship with the government of Indonesia, the largest producer and exporter of palm oil in the world. This relationship is dynamic and characterized by ‘boomerang-effects’: the Indonesian government left the initiative to international NGOs and multinational companies to develop principles and criteria for sustainable palm oil at the RSPO, but is then invited by the RSPO to participate in the national implementation of global principles and criteria. Triggered by the RSPO, the government of Indonesia develops an own, national standard for sustainable palm oil, gradually distancing itself from the RSPO and its global standard.

Political parties normally compete in elections individually. Yet, sometimes they join forces and form pre-electoral alliances. This rather unusual strategy contains both costs and benefits. In this article we try to identify those costs and benefits by opening up the black box of internal party decision making in considering pre-electoral alliance formation. We start by assuming that parties of different electoral sizes could have different motives to face the voter as one electoral list. Through in-depth interviews at the local level in Flanders, we have studied pre-electoral alliance formation for the municipal elections in 2006. We find that the arguments of large parties mainly focus on becoming the leading formation and thus claiming the initiative in coalition formation. Small parties have more varied motives for forming or failing to form a pre-electoral alliance.

In this concluding article of the special issue on web 2.0 we critically discuss several of the effects of this trend. Is it always a good idea to let citizens participate in policy making through social media? Will Open Data only lead to positive effects? And will the co-creation possibilities of web 2.0 really dramatically alter the ways in which bureaucracies function, as its advocates believe? We also draw up an agenda for future research on the governmental effects of web 2.0.

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.

New means of communication, especially social media, dramatically alter the relationship between citizens and government. The internet is a platform for political discourse now in which citizens not only interact with governments but often play a leading role. This demands of government to learn how to act in a more responsive fashion. In this issue, we focus on the practical effects of web 2.0 for various governmental organizations and draw up a research agenda.

Relations between government and news media are often complex and contradictory. In order to shed light on their interactions, this review essay discusses four recent books on the tensions between government and the media. Discussed are Schudson's Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press, Prenger et al's Gevaarlijk spel, Cook's Governing with the News and Keane's Life and Death of Democracy. Three general issues are discussed: the ways in which journalists and policy actors behave towards each other; the implications for the daily practices of journalists and policy actors and, on a more abstract level, the implications for the democratic system. It is argued that critical and inconvenient news media fulfil a crucial role in a vital democracy, as essential checks for those in power. The news media facilitate the interaction between the fragmented parts of a monitory democracy and thus enhance a well-functioning government. In order to cope with media pressure, government pr-officials try to pacify journalists, but at the same time, government and public organizations should be wary of the incorporation of media rules in their own processes as this may lead to a mediatisation of politics.

The article analyses the internal coordination between the federal government, the Regions and the Communities in Belgium before and during the 2010 Belgian Presidency of the Council of Ministers. It starts from the observation that the absence of a federal government with full powers, the global financial-economic crisis as well as Belgium’s complex multi-level structure have, counterintuitively, not led to an ineffective internal coordination process. Based on interviews with people who were closely involved in the Belgian Presidency team, the article explains the effectiveness of the internal coordination by arguing that, on the one hand, the detailed and inclusive coordination before the Presidency semester has generated a culture of responsibility and joint ownership among the officials and diplomats and, on the other hand, the Belgian Presidency limited its role to being a facilitator of the European decision-making process in function of the rolling agenda of the Commission and the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty. Empirically illustrating these arguments with insights from the internal coordination in the environmental domain, this article demonstrates that an effective internal coordination, even in a difficult political context, can contribute to a successful Presidency.

Public Private Partnerships (PPP), especially those geared to exercise public legal powers (‘Authoritative PPP’), are suggestive of tensions between private party involvement and public legitimacy. Hence, public legitimacy is analyzed primarily on the basis of work done by David Beetham, and complemented with Public Law legitimacy considerations concerning the exercise of legal powers and law on public organizations. The findings project that there is room to convincingly frame legitimate PPP involving public authority, but that the scope is restricted both in terms of legal constraints and of political sensitivity.As a result of this, truly wicked policy projects, which in theory stand to gain most by PPP, in practice seem to be considered less suited for Authoritative PPP (and probably more for Network PPP).

Good governance is a contested concept in public administration theory and practice. This concluding article builds on the presented contributions as well as on additional research. First, we summarize the diversity, leading to a sketch of two basic approaches towards good governance (organizational and value oriented). Additionally questions concerning the normativity, the pluralism of values and the object of good governance (process or policy) are addressed. Second, attention is paid to strategies to cope with values in governance, acknowledging the tensions between those values. Basic strategies aim at ‘choosing’ between values, ‘accommodating’ (in time, project, context) and ‘connecting’ values (through institutions or hybridization).

A surprising difference between the Netherlands and Flanders is that a Flemish minister may appoint more than 20 advisors, while Dutch ministers can appoint only one or two ‘political assistants’. However, this difference was hardly studied before, although it is a relevant and actual theme. This article analyzes the differences in role and position of Flemish ministerial advisors and Dutch political assistants. We show that there exist large differences between both types of advisors and we discuss the reasons for and consequences of this difference. The institutional context in which both actors work determines a lot their role. Differences in political culture and administrative organization in particular seem to be important explanatory factors.

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.

The literature on the management of organizational change is mostly based on private sector research. Research on the management of change in public sector organizations is relatively scarce. Because of the specific characteristics of public sector organizations, insights in the management of change may not be translated from one sector to the other. In this essay, four recent books about organizational change in public sector organizations are reviewed. Based on these books and other literature, an overview of the contemporary insights in the management of change of public sector organizations is presented.The essay concludes with an agenda for future research.

Behind many notions of ‘governance’, there lies the image of a ‘modest’ or ‘retreating’ state. The assumption is that local and national authorities can only perform effectively if in cooperation with other public and private actors. Generally, it is said, governments increasingly lack the legitimacy for top-down interventions and hence the need of including participative citizen involvement in policy making and implementation. In recent years this democratic image has been disputed in scientific debates because of its lack of attention for new forms of interventionism by the state in societal processes, e.g. crime, youth care, immigration and integration. In this article, we aim to contribute to this other understanding of modern governance by analysing Dutch political discourse between 2001 and 2010 on (implicit) notions of the role and responsibility of the state. We show how the idea of ‘responsibilisation’ of citizens is turned into an argument for more instead of less state involvement in societal processes and citizens’ lives. By emphasizing ‘shared responsibilities’ between government and society, a tricky picture of parity is sketched of this relation. Dutch government presents itself as ‘an ally’ of citizens in fighting pressing social problems, but in the meantime an ideal of ‘responsible behaviour’ is constructed, namely, citizen behaviour in concordance with government’s policy ambitions. Within this political discourse, the socio-liberal idea of ‘responsibility’ turns into ‘responsibilisation on government’s terms’ and ‘irresponsible’ behaviour becomes a legitimate focal point for deep state interventions through techniques of governance.

In recent years the Netherlands have seen an upsurge of housing enclaves. The enclaves are often built as courtyards, castles, estates or apartment complexes. The growing number of people living in housing enclaves indicates a demand for this kind of living areas. However, the motivations behind the increasing popularity of housing enclaves are unclear. Is this a reflection of a long standing tradition of people staying in their own social group, seeking for belonging and sociability? Or does it fit in a global trend of searching for security in gated communities? This paper presents empirical research in the Netherlands that addresses peoples’ motives for living in housing enclaves, as well as the role of the local government in relation to housing enclaves. The research shows that residents of housing enclaves seek a pleasant living environment in the first place, while security is a less important motive. The study gives reason for planners and developers outside the US not to assume that fear of crime and a wish for security are the main reasons for moving to housing enclaves. Further, the study shows that housing enclaves are not completely privatized areas. Local government still has an important role to play.