Willemijn Dicke

“Soft” Public Values in Jeopardy: Reflecting on the Institutionally Fragmented Situation in Utility Sectors

Abstract The value chain in the provision of utility services has been unbundled to allow for liberalization. Reforms created a highly fragmented institutional landscape introducing new actors, a more heterogeneous actor constellation and extra policy levels. This resulting fragmentation holds risks. The safeguard for one value potentially harms other values. We show the risks that concern the more ambiguous, less operationalized, “soft” public values. To achieve the more ambiguous values under the fragmented conditions, we suggest a remedy that allows for ambiguity and fits the current fragmentation.

From clouds to hailstorms: a policy and administrative science perspective on safeguarding public values in networked infrastructures

This paper analyses how public values are achieved in Dutch infrastructures and distinguishes four crucial stages in decision making processes: the advocacy process, the political process, the bureaucratic process and the provision process. An important conclusion of this paper is that the character of public values undergoes significant changes in each of these stages of the decision-making process, generally from more abstract notions to more concrete. With the level of abstraction, the content of the public value also tends to shift from stage to stage. We conclude that a balanced repertoire of safeguarding mechanisms should address the various stages.

'Trade-offs' Versus 'Safety First': How National Differences in Flood Policy Can Be Bridged

Abstract This article compares flood policy in Germany and The Netherlands. Narrative analysis of policies in both countries illuminates profound differences in national approaches to flood prevention. Surprisingly, these conflicts do not seem to hamper international policy making between the two countries, in light of the widely acknowledged success of co-operation on the River Rhine. This analysis helps to deepen our understanding of the advantages and the pitfalls of international co-operation. Narrative analysis shows how ambiguous principles succeed in matching and bridging the two conflicting national policy narratives. However, differences resurface in the implementation of the policy.

Reconstituting the Public-Private Divide under Global Conditions The Case of Dutch and British Water Management

How is the line to be drawn in the public-private divide when those who would bridge it also assert that globalization restricts the state’s ability to deliver public policy objectives? Critics of modernity have seen the distinction between two public-private discourses, state and market, the open and the hidden, as a modern flawed version of classic notions of the democratic citizen community. The projection of the divide on to a global stage appears to take us even further from that ideal. We report the results of a narrative analysis of the way practitioners in the Netherlands and England and Wales now deliver global public goods in the management of water as compared with their predecessors delivering public health and progress in the 19th century. In their adherence to the water systems concept we find them actively supporting a transparent public sphere beyond the state where multiple forms of agency assert global responsibilities.