Samenvatting

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.