Scale is one of the classic themes in the study of Public Administration. Despite much research and debate, a lot of questions remain open. This special issue introduces scale sensitive governance as an alternative concept. It relates to taking into account the context, departing from dogma's or illusions about the ideal scale, and looking for new ways to deal with issues of scale.

Scale is an important topic in the fields of public administration, political sciences, and environmental sciences. How scales are defined, studied, and dealt with varies substantially within and across these fields. This article aims to reduce the existing conceptual confusion regarding scales by disentangling three representative approaches that address both governance and scaling: monocentric governance, multilevel governance, and adaptive governance. It does so by analyzing the differences in underlying views on governing, assumptions about scales, dominant problem definitions regarding scales, and preferred responses for dealing with multiple scales. Finally, this article identifies research opportunities within and across these approaches.

Social welfare has often been presented in the hospital research area in terms of travel costs and or distances. Most hospital cost studies only focus on the private costs generated by hospitals caring for patients. However, patient inputs in terms of patient travel cost and time cost are often neglected. In this article we combine both these factors, and optimize the social cost being the sum of the operating cost of hospitals and the costs of accessibility. This article presents a pure economic model for optimizing the social costs, the optimum gives us insight in the lowest hierarchical administrative level on which the provision of hospital care can be planned.

The model is applied to the Flemish hospital sector for three types of products: revalidation, basic hospital care and radiotherapy. In this study, we point out that as the population (and patient base) increases, existing hospitals would have to expand moving further along the average cost curve into the region where decreasing returns to scale would prevail and by definition, higher cost. Building another hospital could both relieve the pressure on existing hospitals as well as decrease aggregate patient travel costs, i.e., social costs. By dividing the district into regions, we are able to establish the optimal number (and size) of hospitals. We found that the Flemish region should not be divided too much even though travel costs are minimized since the hospitals would be too large and too costly.

While the international community tries to picture what the future of Belgium as a country will be, the different regions (Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels) deal with issues of territorial governance like amalgamations, the future of provinces, city-regions and intergovernmental collaboration. The article maps these issues, but also which facts, interests and arguments are brought to the table, and to what extent policy agendas in the three regions are similar or not. In Wallonia and Flanders, the existence of the provincial tier is questioned and intermunicipal collaboration should become more important. Amalgamation of municipalities is discussed openly in Flanders - with little success so far, while such a debate is absent in Wallonia. The authors zoom in on the debate in Flanders, showing how rich the landscape of intergovernmental and public-private collaboration is, which variations exist, how each policy sector creates and protects its ‘own’ regional turf, how political debate on ‘cleaning up the mess of regional organisations’ requires nuancing, and how the Belgian political culture shapes that sectoral regional landscape. The authors build on two regional mappings, combining descriptive information with input from the interactive processes with different stakeholders on issues of efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability.

There is no world government for sustainability, whereas many of todays' sustainability issues are of a global scale. This paradox explains the rise of global, often private, partnerships to develop principles and criteria for sustainability. The central theme of this article is the relationship between global partnerships and national governments in governing sustainability. Are these global partnerships an excuse for governments not to take the lead in organizing sustainable palm oil, or do they activate governments to take up their public responsibilities? Is there synergy, coordination or rather competition between these different agents and scales of governance? The case is about the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and its relationship with the government of Indonesia, the largest producer and exporter of palm oil in the world. This relationship is dynamic and characterized by ‘boomerang-effects’: the Indonesian government left the initiative to international NGOs and multinational companies to develop principles and criteria for sustainable palm oil at the RSPO, but is then invited by the RSPO to participate in the national implementation of global principles and criteria. Triggered by the RSPO, the government of Indonesia develops an own, national standard for sustainable palm oil, gradually distancing itself from the RSPO and its global standard.

In the Netherlands there is an ongoing discussion on the preferred or even necessary scale of government. Basic assumption in this decades-long discussion is that the mere seize of government affects the functioning and quality of government. This article questions that specific assumption, by applying two criteria; government performance and democratic legitimacy. It is concluded that the supposed relationship between seize and quality hardly exists, theoretically nor empirically. Recent government proposals for further up-scaling are being critically assessed. Main conclusion is that thinking in terms of scale and seize is no longer feasible in a modern network society.

The theme of scale is simply too big to grasp in one special issue of this journal. However, having discussed some topical issues of scale, we denounce the illusion of an ideal scale and welcome a new perspective. We introduce the concept of scale sensitive governance and use insights from the different articles in this special issue to discuss the concept. Scale sensitive governance relates to 1) being sensitive towards different logics of scale, 2) leaving behind scale as a dogmatic concept, and (3) linking scale to broader developments in society.

This article analyses how the European Union functions internally when it participates in international environmental negotiations. It examines the relations between, on the one hand, the European member states and, on the other hand, the EU negotiator who represents the member states around the international negotiation table. Applying a principal-agent model, this article demonstrates, first, that the member states are able to control their negotiator and the way the latter negotiates internationally through the so-called ad locum control mechanisms, being the on the spot EU coordination meetings and the ability of the member states to attend the international negotiations. Second, this article argues that these institutional structures not only have a control function, but also a cooperation function. Finally, the analysis shows that the EU decision-making processes with regard to international environmental negotiations are not only characterized by the principals controlling their agent, but also by the agent keeping its principals under control.

There seems to be a contradiction between what is happening in public administration discipline and public administration practice. Whereas public administration discipline and law largely separated during the past decades public administration practice and law have converged. Recently three books have been published which emphasize the importance of the rule of law as an explanatory variable for public administration's design and behavior. In this review essay these books are discussed from a public administration theory perspective. The point of departure of the authors substantially differs. Beckett (‘Public Management and the Rule of Law’, 2010) focuses on the rule of law, Cooper (‘Public Law & Public Administration’, 2007) and Rosenbloom, O'Leary & Chanin (‘Public Administration and Law’, 2010) aim at constitutionalizing public administration. The rule of law and the constitution prove to be shaky grounds for a public administration theory. In general constitutional competence may be important for public managers and professionals, but what it means for everyday practices is not easy to establish. The authors therefore extensively describe American public law, emphasizing the constitutional constraints and general administrative law. With these books the authors provide excellent building blocks for a comparative approach of the rule of law from a public administration perspective. The aim of such an approach would be to discover patterns between legal and constitutional designs on the one hand and everyday administrative practices on the other hand.