Local public management reforms in the Netherlands: fads, fashions and winds of change

Abstract

Compared to other continental European countries, especially Germany and Switzerland, which have experimented with New Public Management (NPM) in local government, The Netherlands has been relatively quick in following trends stemming from Anglo-Saxon management thinking, but also relatively quick in redressing its course. The rise of the New Public Management in Dutch local government has been relatively swift and strong but also relatively superficial and non-committal. The dominant picture that emerges is one of an administrative system that, while responsive to the latest trends, is also surprisingly stable. Management reforms, forcefully advocated in the 1980s, were decisively revised and redressed in the 1990s, with the city of Tilburg, celebrated for its 'Tilburg Model', a case in point. The Werdegang of NPM (that is, how things developed) in Dutch local government, detailed in this article, can be understood only partially as a result of changing economic and budgetary constraints. The article shows that endogenous features of the Dutch politico-administrative system -more specifically: the compact, dense and decentralized pattern of the intergovernmental network, the administrative tradition of pragmatism, dynamic conservatism and the comparatively technocratic character of local government -have also strongly influenced the reception, effect and correction of NPM in Dutch local government.

Municipalities’ Choices of Service Delivery Modes: The Influence of Service, Political, Governance, and Financial Characteristics

“…Local government in the Netherlands is considered the most important and visible level of sub-national government in the Dutch decentralized unitary state (Hendriks and Tops 2003). It has an autonomous position and can initiate local policies it considers important for the local community.…”

New public management as a global education policy: its adoption and re-contextualization in a Southern European setting

“…They embraced NPM because they considered that for more conventional macro-economic stability prescriptions to be effective, they would need to be combined with a public choice approach to public sector reform (Fine, 2006). Thus, apparently, in the early years of NPM, budgetary discipline was the main driver of its dissemination and adoption, both in developed and developing contexts (Hendriks and Tops, 2003). However, some researchers point out that, in some cases, NPM adoption does not necessarily correlate with periods of economic crisis, and that instead there are motives of a political nature that are in play.…”

Outsourcing Planning : What do consultants do in a regional spatial planning in the Netherlands

“…As discussed earlier, NPM never got a really strong foothold in Dutch spatial planning. Also, NPM lost influence in other policy domains very quickly and became replaced by "interactive planning" as the central steering philosophy in the early 1990's (Hendriks and Tops 2003). Interactive planning stood for the involvement of stakeholders and citizens during the policy formulation phase.…”

“…During the interactive process, more than thousand members of interest groups, the professional field, public officials, enterprises, and citizens participated in a wide variety of settings, such as workshops, presentations, discussion on the Internet, "legs on the table meetings," a youth forum, a drawing contest for children, essay assignments and interviews. 21 Also, local and regional governments started to experiment with all kinds of interactive projects and started to enter into partnerships with private actors themselves (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal 2000, Hendriks and Tops 2003). Van der Cammen and De Klerk (2003) characterize this period as a "kaleidoscope of approaches" and Hajer (2000) speaks of an "experimentieerfreude" to designate the wide variety of settings in which new institutional practices between public officials, experts, citizens, and stakeholders were tried out.…”

“…Several mechanisms contributed to the change of the planning system. First, although NPM never really got a strong foothold in spatial planning (Hendriks and Tops 2003), decentralization, the need to focus more on implementation and the popularity of public-private partnerships became more prevalent in spatial planning. Through decentralization the national government reduced its strong role in producing strong concepts for spatial planning and local governments went more their own ways (Needham and Zwanikken 1997, Korthals Altes 2001.…”