Gerard Breeman

Governance Capabilities for Dealing Wisely With Wicked Problems

This article explores an integrative approach for dealing with wicked problems. Wicked problems not only require alternative action strategies but also alternative ways of observing and enabling. Four governance capabilities are essential: (a) reflexivity, or the capability to deal with multiple frames; (b) resilience, or the capability to adjust actions to uncertain changes; (c) responsiveness, or the capability to respond to changing agendas and expectations; (d) revitalization, or the capability to unblock stagnations. These capabilities form the basis for achieving small wins in wicked problems. We illustrate our argument with examples from sustainable food production of the Common Agricultural Policy.

Effects of the Core Functions of Government on the Diversity of Executive Agendas

The distribution of attention across issues is of fundamental importance to the political agenda and outputs of government. This article presents an issue-based theory of the diversity of governing agendas where the core functions of government—defense, international affairs, the economy, government operations, and the rule of law—are prioritized ahead of all other issues. It undertakes comparative analysis of issue diversity of the executive agenda of several European countries and the United States over the postwar period. The results offer strong evidence of the limiting effect of core issues—the economy, government operations, defense, and international affairs—on agenda diversity. This suggests not only that some issues receive more attention than others but also that some issues are attended to only at times when the agenda is more diverse. When core functions of government are high on the agenda, executives pursue a less diverse agenda—focusing the majority of their attention on fewer issues. Some issues are more equal than others in executive agenda setting.

Comparing Government Agendas Executive Speeches in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and Denmark

At the beginning of each parliamentary session, almost all European governments give a speech in which they present the government’s policy priorities and legislative agenda for the year ahead. Despite the body of literature on governments in European parliamentary democracies, systematic research on these executive policy agendas is surprisingly limited. In this article the authors study the executive policy agendas—measured through the policy content of annual government speeches—over the past 50 years in three Western European countries: the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Contrary to the expectations derived from the well-established “politics matters” approach, the analyses show that elections and change in partisan color have little effect on the executive issue agendas, except to a limited extent for the United Kingdom. In contrast, the authors demonstrate empirically how the policy agenda of governments responds to changes in public problems, and this affects how political parties define these problems as political issues. In other words, policy responsibility that follows from having government power seems much more important for governments’ issue agendas than the partisan and institutional characteristics of governments.

Governance of wicked climate adaptation problems

Climate change adaptation has been called a “wicked problem par excellence.” Wicked problems are hard to define because ‘the formulation of the problem is the problem; they are considered a symptom of another problem; they are highly resistant to solutions and extremely interconnected with other problems. Climate change problems are even more complex because they lack a well-structured policy domain, and knowledge about climate change is uncertain and contested. Given the wicked characteristics of the climate issue and its particular challenges, the question is which theories are useful starting points for the governance of climate adaptation? The chapter distinguishes between theories and concepts that focus on reflexivity, on resilience, on responsiveness and on revitalisation. Instead of integrating these theories in one overarching governance approach, the chapter suggests an approach of theoretical multiplicity. It proposes that exploiting the variety of concepts and strategies based on the different theories can increase the governance capacity to deal with climate change. Finally, it addresses the moral dimension of wicked problems, which suggests that it is unacceptable to treat a wicked problem as though it were a tame one. Governance scholars nowadays risk raising expectations far beyond their ability to deliver, and thus enhance confusions over whether wicked problems are in fact tame ones.

The European Commission's ability to deal with wicked problems: an in-depth case study of the governance of food security

ABSTRACT The European Commissions ability to cope with wicked problems is generally viewed as inadequate because of its hierarchical and inflexible modus operandi. Recent research suggests, however, that the Commission may be better equipped to deal with wicked problems than is commonly assumed. To elucidate these contradictory viewpoints, we analysed conditions that enable or constrain the Commission in dealing with wicked problems. To do so, we applied a framework consisting of five governance capabilities required to deal with wicked problems (reflexivity, responsiveness, resilience, revitalization and rescaling) to a case study of how the Commission deals with the wicked problem of food security. Although our results confirm some of the earlier critiques, we have also identified various enabling conditions, most notably inter-service and inter-institutional procedures and structures, boundary arrangements and a widespread tolerance of frame conflicts, uncertainty and cross-scale dynamics. However, the Commission lacks a mechanism to continuously monitor and adjust its capabilities, thereby running the risk of challenges remaining unforeseen and unanticipated.

Analysing Local Policy Agendas: How Dutch Municipal Executive Coalitions Allocate Attention

Abstract This article provides an analysis of the allocation of attention to policy problems on the local level, focusing on the executive agenda of six municipalities in the Netherlands over a 25-year period. It reveals that there is specifically a local politics of attention, showing differences between national and local policy agendas in specific policy areas. We did not find evidence that the political composition of the local executive coalitions leads to agenda differences, revealing the more problem-oriented and pragmatic nature of local politics. We did find evidence of an effect of institutional arrangements between national and local government on shifting patterns of attention, such as due to decentralisation. This shows that the local politics of attention is limited in scope and conditioned by the functions of local government and the institutional arrangements of policy making in the Dutch decentralised unitary state and that rearrangements affect these patterns of attention.

Morality Issues in the Netherlands: Coalition Politics under Pressure

A century ago a government composed of Christian parties successfully passed new legislation on contraception, abortion and prostitution (Outshoorn 2001: 205).1 What came to be known as the restrictive ‘Morality Acts’ of 1911 remained in force for more than 60 years, until changes to Dutch society and party political landscape led to a new legislative agenda. However, calls for more permissive policies and actual legislative reform in the Dutch coalition system do not meet so easily, especially in matters of morality that involve religious principles. Such religious principles are institutionalized in the party system, where Christian parties compete with secular parties. They often conflict over issue definitions, but nearly always have to take office together to build a stable parliamentary majority. Thus, in the Dutch system of coalition governments, the religious versus secular conflict is almost constantly present.

Domestic change and EU compliance in the Netherlands: policy feedback during enforcement

Abstract This article explores the impact of domestic politics on the implementation of European Union (EU) directives in the Netherlands. Its central argument is that member states can change their views on EU policies during the implementation of the directive. The resulting new mismatch between domestic and European policies can cause a divergence in policy outlook among EU members, deadlock situations and attempts to change or reverse the directive. Thus far, EU implementation studies consider mismatches between EU and domestic norms mainly as a problem of delayed implementation and assume that governments eventually achieve full compliance. In contrast, we argue that domestic responses to EU directives could cause a continuous flow of severe criticism at the domestic level. This feedback could lead to a reinterpretation of the directive at the national level, but also to attempts to change the directive at the EU level. We use the EU directive on Foot and Mouth Disease as a case study to illustrate how shifting values in Dutch politics have caused such strong feedback.

Myths and Milestones: The Europeanization of the Legislative Agenda in the Netherlands

In July 2010, the Chamber of Representatives in the Netherlands, the Tweede Kamer, used a new parliamentary tool to constrain the government’s mandate on European policy proposals. This tool enables the Chamber to list issues for discussion with ministers in the national parliament before they represent the country in European policy-making. This first case of early parliamentary detection and involvement in EU policy-making followed after several years of stalemate and silence over European issues on the national political agenda.