Roel Veld

• doctor of law
• Unesco professor Governance and Sustainability at Tilburg University

He really doesn’t understand anything at all! Colliding rationalities as a perspective to improve collaboration This contribution addresses the question of competences and skills for public professionals to improve collaboration. The authors start their search by looking for a conceptual focus. Poor collaboration is conceptualized as ‘colliding rat...

Conclusions This article draws several conclusions based on the case studies featured in this special issue. It places them amidst broader developments in public administration theory and practice, formulates several lessons and describes possible paths for future research.

Sustainable development is all over the place. The concept is broad and vague. The vagueness of the concept has a Janus face. It has been called a unifying concept because its vagueness breeds a consensus that might be utilised later on. Vagueness is an asset if it triggers action. On the other hand, if sustainable development is everything, maybe...

This chapter addresses the requirements of a good process. Some of these requirements can be met through the right process design. This is where we enter the domain of negotiation architecture [22, 29]. The structure of the chapter is as follows. Section 3.2 will introduce the four main requirements of a process, or process agreements (we will refe...

The fourth core element of the process approach is substance: the process that is developed under the guidance of the process manager must be sufficiently substantive. After all, a process without substance is empty. The preceding chapters have already pointed out repeatedly that a decision-making process may degenerate into a process for the sake...

Chapter 5 addressed the open nature of decision making. Open decision making has major advantages, but it may also be quite threatening to the parties involved. They have particular interests and are not always sure whether their participation in an open decision-making process will actually serve their interests. They might get ‘trapped’, or perha...

The design principles outlined in the previous chapter may be helpful when making process agreements, but of course the main question remains how such agreements are made. In this chapter we will answer this question as follows. (Both the current chapter and Chap. 5 are partly based on actual process designs and draft process designs that we made i...

This chapter examines ways for the process manager to ensure that the decision making is an open process: the relevant parties have to be involved in the decision making and they must be certain that their interests will be addressed where possible, in accordance with the process agreements. This implies that the initiator as well as these parties...

So far, we have argued that process management is characterized by openness. The main stakeholders are invited to participate in a process and are involved in drawing up the agenda. Openness, however, is not without risk for these stakeholders. They can perceive the process as a funnel trap: once they have joined, they may feel that they are forced...

This book is about change. Change in complex issues. Change in complex issues always has the following three characteristics. Firstly, there are always multiple actors involved in this type of change. Put differently, the changes occur in a network of actors. These actors are, in a sense, dependent on each other. They need each other’s support in e...

On 13 September, 1993, Israelis and Palestinians signed the Oslo peace accords. Formal negotiations had commenced in Norway on 11 June 1993. But the move ‘to go to the table’ was preceded by months of unofficial dialogue between the two sides. And even these unofficial dialogues could not simply be initiated. They were preceded by years of careful...

What is it that makes a manager or a politician a successful decision maker? Our first inclination would be to say decisiveness and substance. Many managers who met those criteria, however, have had to abandon the field in the past several years. - The authors of Process Management regard a manager as successful if he pays much attention to the pro...

Public administration badly needs a firm underlying theoretical framework. Such a framework should enable the scholars who concentrate on problems concerning public policies, on questions related to the connections between public authorities and society at large, on questions related to effective regulation or steering — the central process in poli...

Education and research can be considered as important investments in society. Government financing greatly outweighs market relationships, but policy today aims at more involvement of industry. Government regulations relating to universities appeared to be an insufficient guarantee that research generates applications. In order to improve the knowl...

SAMENVATTENDE CONCLUSIE: Aan de RMNO is gevraagd om een advies uit te brengen aan het Ministerie van Verkeer & Waterstaat, dat ingaat op het bestuurlijk vermogen rond watervraagstukken als onderdeel van gebiedsontwikkeling. In welke mate zijn de betrokken actoren in staat oplossingen voor watervraagstukken te realiseren? Hoe kan dit vermogen vergr...

This article deals with some aspects of the problems raised by the use of a specific majority rule as a mechanism of decision-making, viz. (i) given some particular preference-patterns of the individual voters, the result of the voting, i.e. the “social” ordering of the available alternatives, lacks the property of transitivity; (2) the intensities...