Amidst the turbulence of recent crises, governments’ capacity to govern and to deliver public value is under serious pressure. Public institutions are working hard to come up with new and improved schemes for dealing with complex and wicked policy issues that have emerged or just wont go away. But government alone cannot solve most of these issues. Governments already attempted to make ‘better, smarter policy’ in the hopes of raising performance. They also invested heavily in ‘participation’ of citizens, by inviting them to ‘co-create’ policy or ‘join-up’ with government agencies. However, this image of collaboration is one-sided. Besides the efforts initiated by governments themselves, there is a wide array of emerging activities. In these practices, it is not the government that takes action, but society takes ‘public matters’ into its own hands. Just as in many other countries, in The Netherlands groups of citizens have started to organize certain services, tasks or activities that used to be provided by the central or decentralized governmental institutions by themselves (and in most cases, for themselves). This article conceptualizes these emerging practices and analyses how they affect the world of policy making and what they may mean for public administration research.

In this article we aim to provide an insight in one of the specifics of the dynamic relationship between government and society; the delegation of public tasks to (civil) society. The concept ‘Big Society’ in the United Kingdom generated immense expectations in this respect. By making use of an explorative case study, we examine the origins, visions and best practices in successively the UK, Australia and Scandinavia in order to generate a better understanding of this dynamical relationship. The major insights following from this analysis relate to the economic and cultural background, the political reality and rhetoric, as well as to concrete practices to understand what civil society has to offer in the delegation of public tasks. Finally, as a first step towards theory development, we formulate five concrete lessons for the delegation of public tasks to the civil society.

This article explores the intellectual, political and pragmatic origins of the concept Big Society. The authors argue that although the concept has become intertwined with the political ideas of UK’s Prime Minister David Cameron, the concept has also become firmly rooted in society and is thus likely to survive the political life of Cameron. Also outside the UK, the concept has acquired political attention. The authors explore the meaning of Big Society for the Netherlands. Thus far, the concept has reached the political agenda, but time will tell how the concept succeeds to sustain.

This article discusses the realization of public value through social entrepreneurship. It shows practices that can at present be seen in the Dutch society and answers the question: what is the relation between social entrepreneurship and the realization of value in the public domain? We conclude that public value is at the same time the result of the efforts of a social entrepreneur (person) in the beginning of his endeavors, the presupposition for social entrepreneurship (activity) in the phase of growth and the good that is preserved by the social enterprise (organization) by the time it has matured. In realizing public value social entrepreneurs come into contact with government. For government this encounter has quite an awkward nature since government has at the same time both a say (it is responsible for policy) and no say (it is not responsible for individual social entrepreneurial initiatives) regarding the realization of value in the public domain through social entrepreneurship.

Humberto is the name of a popular presentor on Dutch radio and television. In response to an item on a conflict between the Labour Inspectorate and the police authorities, he hesitantly posed the question whether the government should interfere. This is the paradox of citizens viewing the government sometimes as a single actor, whereas at other times they seem to acknowledge the fact that government consists of multiple actors. The use of co-creation and digital platforms could provide means that help todays government to mediate between the two extreme perceptions of government as a unitary actor and government as a conglomerate of actors operating in a networked society in which sometimes government organisations and sometimes other actors, including (groups) of citizens, in society take initiatives to promote and contribute to public values.

Based on the experience of citizens initiatives in Antwerpen (Belgium), Dortmund (Germany) and Rotterdam (the Netherlands), this article explores the roles of citizens in these projects. The initiatives were not started by already active citizens, but by inactive citizens who were triggered to take action by an event in their direct surroundings. The cases studied show that many small, simple and everyday strategies, which are often overlooked by researchers, are meaningful for successful citizenship. The will to participate is not so much ideologically or democratically driven, but driven by a perceived practical need for action. Governments should aim to support and facilitate these initiatives without aiming to canalize these activities according to their own political or democratic rationality.

The report Confidence in Citizens by the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy dominantly supports increased room for citizen participation. Based on many examples, the report shows how society benefits from the many citizens’ initiatives and how government interference can hamper or even obstruct these initiatives, which do not fit the logic of civil servants. The report gives four, rather general suggestions of how policy makers could respond to these citizens’ initiatives. The generic character of these recommendations can be ascribed to a weak problem analysis and a biased understanding of how government actions negatively interfere with citizens’ initiatives. The Council could have asked more critical questions with regards to citizens initiatives and how they should respond to the logic of government.

‘Big Society’ has been one of those inspirational concepts that have recently swept through the public administration literature. With their appeal for a ‘Big Society’, the British Tories contrasted their policy program with Labours’ traditional ‘Big Government’ program. Upon closer inspection, however, it is revealed that the underlying analysis is not new at all, but reflects a specific analysis that can be traced back to Wilson’s famous essay on the study of public administration in 1887. Stripped from its details, the never-ending story claims that public administration now struggles with overwhelming complexity, which makes traditional bureaucratic methods obsolete and calls for innovative, new approaches. The fact that this story has remained fairly constant for over 125 years is cause for some concern. The article traces the historical genesis of this never-ending story and lands on a plea for more sophisticated attention for administrative history, more critical scrutiny of new ideas and more serious study of the nature and effects of complexity.

Research on the implementation of air-quality directives in the Netherlands shows that national and local governments have taken substantial measures to increase air quality. Still, the norms of the directive are not met. Besides, as a result of the focus on norms, insufficient attention has been paid to the objective of the directive, namely improving health. To examine this, a case study on the implementation of the directive within four Dutch cities has been conducted by their local audit services. This shows that, due to the enforcement capacity of the EU (Sverdrup, 2007), that was made effective through the national courts, the Dutch national and local authorities have taken substantial measures. Domestic preferences and the characteristics of the Netherlands’ public law system, contributed to this. In line with Sverdrup’s (2007) ideas on the domestic management capacity of member states, insufficient measures were taken to meet the norm because responsibilities were not clearly distributed between national and local governments and because of conflicting policy aims. Since this takes place during a drawn-out implementation process, the participating actors need clear information about the progress that is made the policy can improve and be enforced during the implementation phase. Independent, local and national, auditors can help the European Committee to provide this insight.

In the section Review Essay, Gert-Jan Hospers discusses four recent monographies on urban design as a means to achieve political ambitions.

In the section Dissertations, Maarten Smaal introduces his work on the long-lasting policy discourse on road pricing and alternative policy instruments in the Netherlands.

In the Chronicle of a recent policy trend Gjalt de Graaf and Albert Meijer discuss how the new network society influences public administration by exploring a specific case of how citizens are aiming to bring their resigned mayor back in office by a social media campaign.