Wicked problems ask for new, smart forms of governance beyond a singular focus on hierarchy, market or community. Based on the case studies presented in the individual articles of this special issue, this concluding article describes what smart governance could entail and discusses its strengths and weaknesses, both as a concept and a practical tool.

During a disaster or crisis, the response capacity of the government is put under extreme pressure. At the same time, citizens are often resilient in times of crisis and are increasingly capable of organizing themselves. Social media and online platforms have increased the possibilities for self-organization through improved connectivity. In practice, we see that governments struggle to deal with this form of self-organization, while it also offers a unique opportunity to increase the response capacity. The smart use of citizens’ initiatives offers opportunities and can increase the effectiveness of the government’s action. This article focuses on the following question: what role do online platforms play in smartly guiding the self-organization of citizens during crises and disasters? We answer the question on the basis of two examples: the role of online platforms in the aftermath of the earthquakes in Nepal in 2015, and the coordination of the reception of refugees during the crisis in the Netherlands in the winter of 2015-2016.

In the Netherlands, the Dutch government public private partnerships (PPP) using DBFMO contracts has become the default option for realizing complex public infrastructures. DBFMO contracts imply the integrated outsourcing of the design (D), building (B), financing (F), the maintenance (M), and also often the exploitation (O) of projects to private actors. The general idea is that by bundling public and private resources, the increasing complexity of today’s public infrastructure projects can be tackled more easily. However, reality is contumacious. As a consequence of several problems related to DBFMO collaborations, the Dutch highway and water management agency Rijkswaterstaat and several private actors recently put forward a new market vision. This vision is a call to reinvent the dominant collaboration practice between public and private actors: relational aspects should be central. In managing projects, more attention should be given to the quality of relations, attitudes, openness and trust. Recent research confirms that the success of DBFMO projects is not only contingent on contractual aspects but also, and maybe even more importantly, on relational aspects. Smart governance involves a shift from the current dominant financial economic-oriented contractual approach to PPP towards a more sociologically inspired relational form of governance.

The Dutch social care system was fundamentally reformed in 2015. A key policy aim was to activate citizens and their social networks, turning them from mere consumers into co-producers of care. The expectation was that, by doing so, public spending could be reduced and community engagement could be restored at the same time. Regulation was put in place to incentivize network support.
Whether this constitutes ‘smart governance’, however, depends on whether the variety of factors determining sustainable network support can be identified in the first place. At present, the new care policy is supposed to apply indiscriminately, and is as such not yet evidence based. In addition, flaws in the present budgetary and regulatory steering mechanisms need to be addressed. Potential users are not very familiar with the regulation in place for incentivizing network support, and the regulation is currently neutralized by law courts, unaware of the participatory relationship between care authorities and citizens as envisaged by the 2015 reform. Moreover, engaging networks is time-consuming and requires investments before returns can start to materialize. From a normative stance, network volunteers moreover ought to participate in decision-making, as they will be investing their private resources (such as time) instead of tax payers money. Effectiveness and legitimacy are thus two prerequisites for governance in the social domain to be genuinely ‘smart’.

This article reports on an analysis of the effectiveness and legitimacy of modes of governance in four European regions that clearly show signs of hybridity, that is, they have private as well as public characteristics. Berlin, Eindhoven, Copenhagen-Malmö and Zurich thus aim to increase the problem-solving capacity of their regional governance and to govern ‘smartly’ in a complex and multi-level context. The individual cities search for effective links with private and societal actors, each in its own way. Legitimacy is an issue that is hardly reflected upon, though. Hybrid modes of governance may have negative impacts on both effectiveness and legitimacy, but also offer new opportunities for good governance. ‘Hybrid’ and ‘smart’ do not always go hand in hand, but they are not mutually exclusive either.

Traditional state-centered governance systems have failed to effectively tackle the transnational problem of the sustainability of global value chains (GVCs). To fill this ‘institutional void’, industry and NGOs established a series of global partnerships that designed standards and certification schemes for global commodities. This paper uses different theoretical lenses to address the question as to what extent these arrangements can be evaluated as smart, and for what and for whom they are smart? Despite their relative success, these partnerships face some serious challenges. Consequently, smart governance also requires adaptiveness and the prevention of path dependencies.

Collaboration between public actors and social partners is becoming increasingly important as an administrative solution for complex societal challenges in health care, spatial development, mobility management or water management. In this article we focus on the relationship between the central Flemish government and local networks that are set up by this government. In the scientific literature much attention is paid to the concept of metagovernance as analytical perspective to analyze the relationship between the government and networks. The concept offers the government a toolbox with roles and instruments from which it can choose to support and stimulate networks in order to achieve the desired network results. However, our research shows that such an approach is not sufficient to capture the relationship between the central government and local mandated networks in Flanders. We argue for a broader interpretation of the concept of metagovernance, in which the dynamics of local networks are viewed as the outcome of power relations between actors that are represented at both local and central level and that are intertwined with each other. Only in this way will we we understand why certain choices are made about local mandated networks, why local networks show a lack of dynamism and why local actors in local networks also do not want local networks to become more dynamic and effective. We do notice that the pressure on these arrangements is increasing, partly due to new actors who are not involved in these arrangements.