The Dutch municipality of Leiden used to be a rather ‘politically troublesome’ municipality, but after the formulation of a short coalition agreement during the 2010 to 2014 term of office, for the first time in a long while, no alderman was sent away. So, could short coalition agreements help to diminish the number of political conflicts, so that aldermen can remain in office for a longer period? In the first place, the answer to this question is important from a societal point of view because in the Netherlands an increasing number of aldermen are sent away. In the second place, it is important from an academic point of view because there is a lack of studies into local coalition agreements. In the third place, it is important because the analysis of the length of coalition agreements and the number of conflicts in almost all Dutch municipalities in the period 2010 to 2014 offers a good opportunity to test the contradictory expectations on the relationship between coalition agreements and political conflicts in Dutch municipalities at a national level. From the analysis, the authors conclude that there is a relationship between a high number of coalition parties and a large municipality, on the one hand, and longer coalition agreements, on the other hand. The length of the coalition agreements is not necessarily related to the number of conflicts measured by the number of aldermen sent away for political reasons. It is clear that the higher the number of coalition parties, the more conflicts there are likely to be, which is not an inviting prospect considering the ongoing fragmentation of municipal councils.

Since 2001, the Dutch province of Overijssel has had its own knowledge centre focusing on urban society, called the ‘KennisInstituut Stedelijke Samenleving’ (KISS), alongside national knowledge centres. This essay gives an overview of some relevant KISS meetings devoted to a many kinds of citizen participation. The overview is based on reports made by the author himself. Examples of citizen participation are: the new styles of neighbourhood governance, citizen participation through neighbourhood budgets, the strength of the city and location-based leadership, innovative urban renewal and the promotion of citizen initiatives in the province of Overijssel. Examples are not only from the province of Overijssel (situated in the east of the Netherlands), but also from other parts of the Netherlands and other countries (Flanders, United Kingdom, United States and all over the world). The subject of citizen participation (in connection with urban renewal and administrative leadership) enjoys an ever-increasing popularity as is shown by the number of KISS meetings devoted to this subject.

On April 8^th 2015, Jan Schrijver got his PhD at Maastricht University (Arno Korsten was his doctoral thesis supervisor) on research into 40 years of Dutch administrative policy (1969 to 2009). This period largely coincided with his career as a senior civil servant (1976 to 2003). The expectation often predicted in Public Administration was that a shift from government to governance (from cockpit thinking to a network society) would occur in the dominant administrative theory. However, this shift was not detected in the Departments of Home Affairs and Agriculture during the research period. In the literature on Dutch local administration, qualitative (and often ambivalent) information is generally to be found. On the one hand, this literature emphasizes the inevitability of this shift and offers a lot of case descriptions. On the other hand, Dutch handbooks on local administration devote little attention to this development and contain many views that point to stubborn administrative methods employed by old-style governors. The author concludes that Dutch national administration converges to one firm, while local administration diverges into a leading group of municipalities and a group of followers.

Polling is being done a great deal in the Netherlands, especially during election campaigns when market researchers sometimes present new polls every day. The national government also takes polls that are often larger and more complicated than the quick and small polls conducted by market research agencies. They are often called surveys, and they gather information on the state of affairs in society. That information can become the basis for new policies. Local governments also take polls, although on a smaller scale than national government. Dutch municipalities have a tradition of organizing omnibus surveys in which (as the name indicates) several subjects can be addressed. Nowadays many ‘omnibus surveys have been replaced by ‘citizen panels’. One thing all these polls and surveys have in common is that they are based on random samples of the population and statements are made about the population as a whole based on these samples. Such generalizations are only possible if the sample is drawn using by random sampling methods. This article describes good and bad polling. This is illustrated using a unique example: the research into the opinion of the inhabitants of Alphen aan den Rijn, a Dutch municipality, on Sunday shopping. At the same time, and using the same questionnaire, three different polls were carried out. This example makes clear that the wrong sample can lead to incorrect conclusions and maybe to incorrect policy decisions.

The research programme Urban Regions in the Delta (URD) wielded an approach worthy of emulation. Create ‘vital’ project consortia, crosslink the research project with on-going planning and policy making processes, give senior scientists a major role and engage expert process managers. These are four key success factors for knowledge co-creation in the field of area development, according to the programme (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research; URD, 2010-2014 http://urd.verdus.nl). Within URD scientists and practitioners were cooperating from the very beginning. The scientific insight and innovations generated are considered not very visible in traditional scientific publications, but the knowledge that was developed provides considerable added value to society.

Planning research is increasingly focused on bridging the gap between practice and academia. However, this requires much effort and is not as commonplace as it seems. To ensure success, innovative research approaches, practitioners and academics are required. The experiential learning cycle of Kolb and Fry (1974) offers a research framework for the authors to reflect on their practice-oriented research on Cost Benefit Analysis processes (CBA) and Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) respectively. Both research projects are compared using the learning cycle. The cycle was completed in the CBA project but only partially resolved in the TOD project. Reflecting on their experiences with applying the learning cycle, the authors conclude on the possibilities and limitations of this application and offer insight into how the interaction between theory and practice can occur.

In this interview Jeroen Slot (head of Research & Statistics, Municipality of Amsterdam) and Kees van Paridon (former chief science officer, municipality of Rotterdam) share their ideas and reflect on their extensive experience with linking scientific knowledge and local policy making. They discuss the divergence between established institutions and emergent knowledge needs and the problematic entwinement of scientific knowledge and policy development. Conditions are proposed for the design of intermediaries between the academic and governmental sectors.

This article shows the relevance of Burawoy’s analytical categories on the division of scientific labour to analyse the interactions between science and practice. It argues that social scientists need to combine the roles of expert witness, social engineer and storyteller in order to develop a productive relationship with policy makers. It also emphasises the relevance of a permanent dialogue between social scientists and policy makers. However, the analysis disagrees with Burawoy’s view that knowledge is based on a consensus between scientists and their publics (consensual knowledge). Burawoy underestimates the risk of a politicisation of science inherent to a close relationship with various ‘publics’. The arguments presented in this article are based on the reception of a research project on labour migration from Central and Eastern Europe. This was a hybrid research project in which different actors participated: the Erasmus University, nine Dutch municipalities, the national government and a Dutch knowledge center on urban issues.

Forty years ago, Dutch Public Administration started as an independent academic discipline. The founding fathers considered empirical application and multidisciplinarity the most important characteristics of public administration. This article assesses the current state of the discipline in the Netherlands. The assessment is the result of a series of five debates throughout the country, focussing on different elements of the Public Administration discipline: education, academic research, consultancy and policy advice. In brief, the article argues that the discipline has reached maturity in these forty years. It has become an accepted academic discipline, on the verge of a mono-discipline. The Netherlands is considered as one of the leading countries in public administration research. However, these successes also create a gap between public administration as a successful academic discipline and its roots as a multi-disciplinary, applied science. Renewing the balance between these two will be the main challenge for the decades to come.

Given the scientific and social importance attached to productive interactions between science and policy practices, there is a striking lack of insight into current knowledge practices and the dilemmas they lead to. Our special issue can’t solve this deficiency but it can provide an impetus for opening up current knowledge practices, reflect on the role of science in them and instigate a more systematic exchange of methods. A warning is given for the reification of boundary work and Gabrielle Bammers’ Implementation and Integration Sciences is introduced as framework for the analyses.

A transition to a bio based economy requires social and technological innovations. Transition management theory holds that these innovations take place in niches that can bring about structural change in society, politics and the economy in a stepwise manner. However, these innovations are always subjected to systemic barriers, such as regulations and institutional structures, that need to be overcome. This was also the case in a consortium of government, industry and eco-toxicologists that collaboratively developed innovative water monitoring tools. In this contribution the authors investigate how systemic barriers can be made productive in a science-society dialogue by creating reflexivity and learning. They conducted a frame analysis of interviews and policy documents to unravel systemic barriers to innovation – in the form of discursive boundary work: the routinized demarcations of practices. Second, they experimented with a science-society dialogue to reflect on these routinized demarcations and develop alternatives to overcome these boundaries. The research demonstrates that reflective conversations occurred and that participants developed a boundary concept of ‘living water’ that enhanced their innovative collaboration and technology.

Co-production is regarded as a way to actively involve vulnerable citizens with public service delivery. However, there are several critical aspects that may lead to the unexpected exclusion of this group by public organizations, which have been insufficiently addressed hitherto. On the basis of a dissertation research, these critical aspects are analyzed for three phases of co-production. In the first phase, self-selection and organizational selection may lead to the exclusion of vulnerable citizens. In the second phase, a lack of commitment of the user and organizational support increase the chance of early discontinuation of co-production by vulnerable citizens. Finally, in the evaluation phase, it is likely that disadvantaged citizens attribute potential success of co-production to themselves and do not reward the public service provider for this. This has the possible consequence that there is no recognition for the added value of co-production, which may lead to less co-production that involves vulnerable citizens in the future.

On a regular basis, the funding of football stadiums is an issue for large cities. Since football clubs appeal to the municipality for financial support, this is a public matter. Why should a municipality invest in a private project, such as a football stadium? What are the opportunities and risks? What is the public value of a stadium for the city? Based on literature reviews and case studies in Eindhoven and Amsterdam, this article examines what government involvement in stadium projects means, and what the outcomes of this involvement are. The cases show that stadiums may have social and economic spin-off effects on their surroundings, but one cannot take that for granted. Careful processes and elaborate strategies are needed for public investment in stadiums to really add value to the city. Based on the analyses, an assessment framework is presented for the benefit of new stadium project initiatives.

When scientific values like objectivity, validity and reliability are inadequate for designing research that enables society’s capacity for dealing with unstructured problems, which values or criteria should we use for designing adequate knowledge practices? Based on the articles in this special issue we answer this question by analysing the methods researchers have used for selecting stakeholders, knowledges, synthesis, context and outcome in new knowledge practices. Although a common language for comparison and documentation is lacking, the analysis provides recommendations for better designing interaction between scientific and other practices. The most important message however is that we need a designated platform for exchanging and evaluating experiences and discussing methods and the outcomes they yield.

In de praktijk is het niet altijd haalbaar om effectonderzoek uit te voeren met behulp van een experimentele trial. Het N=1 design is een alternatieve opzet voor effectonderzoek bij interventies met kleine aantallen. Centraal bij de N=1 aanpak staat dat bij een kleine groep deelnemers via verschillende observanten op meerdere tijdstippen informatie wordt verzameld over de ontwikkeling van deelnemers. Daarbij kan zowel gebruik worden gemaakt van kwantitatieve als kwalitatieve onderzoeksmethoden. Dit artikel beschrijft de toepassing van het N=1 design in een onderzoek naar de doeltreffendheid van de justitiële gedragsinterventie Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (MTFC). Deze interventie is ontwikkeld voor jeugdigen tussen de 12 en 18 jaar met ernstig antisociaal gedrag. In het onderzoek is de ontwikkeling van acht MTFC-deelnemers in kaart gebracht via vragenlijstonderzoek en interviews. Naast de toepassingsmogelijkheden worden in dit artikel tevens de beperkingen en risico’s van het N=1 design beschreven.