Ernst ten Heuvelhof

Improving governance arrangements in support of sustainable cities

Governance to support sustainable development always seems to encounter the same difficulties. The chances of successful governance increase when governance arrangements are better tuned to the environment that it tries to change. However, a better fit leaves less room for change. Governance arrangements supporting sustainable development are more prone to failure, as they aim at changing that environment. Radical institutional change is at the core of sustainable development, but without the help of external factors, such as major crises like the oil crisis in the 1970s, the sense of urgency for such radical change is lacking, and incremental change seems to be the only road available. The authors explore how governance arrangements deal with this recurring barrier to institutional change. Their conclusion is that the more governance arrangements respect the institutional context in which they are used, the higher their quality. To speed up the incremental track, the design of governance arrangements should include positive incentives for actors to cooperate.

Policy analysis and decision making in a network: how to improve the quality of analysis and the impact on decision making

In a network, parties have different interests and are interdependent. This hampers collective decision making. If, in such a network, a policy analysis is made to support the decision making, the findings from this analysis are likely to lack authority. For a policy analysis to be authoritative and to contribute to collective decision making, a process of interaction between the analyst and the parties concerned should be organized. This is called process management. This article presents a number of guidelines for such a process. They are based on two case studies into the use of policy analysis in networks.

The effects of environmental impact assessment in the Netherlands

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) in the Netherlands is found to have great impact: 79% of those examined showed high direct benefits. Even taking into account the time and financial efforts required to produce an EIA, 69% showed a beneficial impact. The explanation offered for this degree of impact is threefold and supported by the research: the process-bound nature of EIA; the possibility of considering EIA as part of the negotiation arena that enables actors to defend their interests and to negotiate on the proposal and implementation methods; the presence of the EIA Committee and its role in the process. An EIA that starts early in the process and focuses on main policy themes is more likely to gain consensus among actors.

Contrasting stories on overcoming governance challenges: the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive in the Netherlands

The European Union Water Framework Directive (WFD) has provided the European Member States with a range of interacting governance challenges. This article studies three of these (the need for new administrative arrangements, public participation, and the enforced strict time frame). It questions how these interacting governance challenges were addressed in implementing the WFD in the Netherlands – a particularly interesting country since the European Commission assesses its implementation process in relatively positive terms, while an in-depth study reported on in this article tells a contrasting story. Based on this study, the article concludes that especially the interaction effects between the governance challenges may help us to better understand the outcome of the WFD-implementation process, and to provide more suitable advice as to how to improve the implementation process in future rounds.

Coping with Mandated Public Participation: The Case of Implementing the EU Water Framework Directive in the Netherlands

An important aspect of contemporary European policy-making is public participation. The European Commission increasingly mandates its Member States to involve the general public in policy-making through public participation. Public participation is generally considered to improve the legitimacy and democracy of the policy-making process and its outcomes. However, mandated public participation creates severe difficulties for Member States whose policy-making process may be characterized as a (neo)corporatist system of interest representation. This paper presents the case of the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive in the Netherlands, aiming to highlight these difficulties, to provide an example of how a Member State may cope with forced public participation in a (neo)corporatist environment, and to question whether and, if so, how mandated public participation actually results in a more democratic and legitimate policy-making process.An important aspect of contemporary European policy-making is public participation. The European Commission increasingly mandates its member states to involve the general public in policy-making through public participation. Public participation is generally considered to improve the legitimacy and democracy of the policy-making process and its outcomes. However, mandated public participation creates severe difficulties for member states whose policy-making process may be characterized as a (neo)corporatist system of interest representation. This paper presents the case of the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive in the Netherlands, aiming to highlight these difficulties, to provide an example of how a member state may cope with forced public participation in a (neo)corporatist environment, and to question whether and, if so, how mandated public participation actually results in a more democratic and legitimate policy-making process.

Strategic Behaviour and Crisis-Driven Change in Regulation and Governance of the European Financial and Economic System: From Networks to Hybrids

A key challenge that European decision-makers struggle with today is regulating and governing the European financial and economic system in a way that is both effective and legitimate. To help address this challenge, this paper asks why regulatory gaps occurred and European governance has been weak, and how these gaps and weaknesses allowed risky behaviour. It then scrutinizes the regulatory governance structures that have emerged in response, particularly at the EU level, to coordinate the financial and economic system. Two illustrative cases are examined: self-regulation by and national supervision of banks and ‘decentred’ fiscal policy coordination by eurozone countries. We point to strategic behaviour as a key driver of the crisis. We also argue that changes in regulatory governance to curb such behaviour have entailed introduction of some form of hierarchy at the supranational level, yet still combined with strong network characteristics, thus creating or strengthening hybridity in regulatory governance.

Management of environmental policy networks

There is a broad consensus on the bad state of the biosphere. There is also agreement on the direction in which the relation between society and nature must be transformed. This relation must be made sustainable.

Competing Values in the Management of Innovative Projects: The Case of the RandstadRail Project

Large engineering projects without late delivery, cost overruns or technical problems seem to be rare (Flyvbjerg et al., 2003). Illustrations of this statement are abundant worldwide (e.g. the French Superphenix project, the German Transrapid project, the Channel Tunnel, Denver International Airport, Boston’s Central Artery Tunnel (Dempsey et al., 1997; Bell, 1998; Altshuler and Luberoff, 2003; Flyvbjerg et al., 2003). The political and societal environments of these projects all ask for safe delivery on time and within a budget. A variety of project management tools have been developed to meet such expectations. However, these projects also have innovative elements, providing situations that implementers (e.g. managers, engineers, operators) of the projects have not met before. These elements require room for improvisation and interaction between implementers, which most project management tools typically do not provide.

An Open Process

This chapter examines ways for the process manager to ensure that the decision making is an open process: the relevant parties have to be involved in the decision making and they must be certain that their interests will be addressed where possible, in accordance with the process agreements. This implies that the initiator as well as these parties should be involved in drawing up the agenda of the process.

Organizing the Policy Analysis Process

The outcomes of traditional policy analysis are often discarded, strategically neglected, or (exactly the opposite) strategically used. This illustrates the reality that politicians are not primarily interested in facts and findings, rather they are involved in a political power game in which policy analysis is just one part of the game. In the domain of water resources management, there have been claims of a paradigm shift toward a more integrated and participatory management style, which is supported by institutional arrangements, such as Integrated Water Resource Management, the European Water Framework Directive, and Shared Vision Planning. In this domain, though, the focus is mostly on active participation of stakeholder representatives with lower tier government and semi-government organizations.