Illuminating the Black Box of the Government to Governance Transformation Thesis: The Case of Dutch City Deals

David Evers, Marloes Dignum and David Hamers

International Journal of Public Administration, 2021, vol. 44, issue 15, 1355-1365

Abstract: The Dutch national government likes to present itself as modern, open and having embraced the transition from government to governance (transformation thesis). In 2015, it launched its ‘Urban Agenda’ to harness the creative potential of cities to solve complex problems by means of city deals: voluntary agreements between municipalities, national ministries and private parties. City deals were supposed to operate according to the precepts of network governance and reap the benefits commonly associated with it. In 2017, research was carried out to investigate whether this was the case. Based on 44 in-depth structured interviews with a representative sample of participants, the city deals were found to exhibit network governance attributes to widely differing degrees. Moreover, little correlation was found between network governance attributes and positive outcomes. As such, this empirical investigation supports the recent critiques of the transformation thesis.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01900692.2020.1759629 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:lpadxx:v:44:y:2021:i:15:p:1355-1365

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/lpad20

DOI: 10.1080/01900692.2020.1759629

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Public Administration is currently edited by Ali Farazmand

More articles in International Journal of Public Administration from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().