Scott Douglas

Utrecht University | UU · School of Governance (USG)

Collaborative governance is popular among practitioners and scholars, but getting a grip on the performance of collaborations remains a challenge. Recent research has made progress by identifying appropriate performance measures, yet managing performance also requires appropriate performance routines. This article brings together insights from coll...

As a group of fifteen scholars from different sub-fields, countries, and generations, we argue that public administration would benefit from launching a self-conscious and cohesive strand of ‘positive’ scholarship, akin to social science subfields like positive psychology, positive organisational studies, and positive evaluation. We call for a prog...

Studying collaborative governance has become a booming business. However, the empirical literature still struggles to produce robust generalizations and cumulative knowledge that link contextual, situational and institutional design factors to processes and outcomes. We still have not mustered the broad and deep evidence base that will really help...

Extensive research has produced many insights into the dynamics of performance management systems. Spreading these complex insights among students and practitioners can be a daunting task. Gathering new insights can be equally challenging. This article introduces a novel tool for teaching and researching performance management, reporting on the des...

This chapter delves into the role of local collaboration as a pragmatist approach for tackling global wicked problems. Specifically, it focuses on the Aarhus Model for countering radicalization, in which local police officers, civil servants, and social workers work together to identify individuals at risk and develop interventions to steer them aw...

Advancing public health through prevention necessitates collaboration among public, private, and community actors. Only together can these different actors amass the resources, knowledge, and community outreach required to promote health. Recent studies have suggested that university medical centres (UMCs) can play a key role in regional prevention...

Strategies to limit consultancy spending by public sector organizations have focused primarily on system-level changes, such as more financial transparency and budget caps. These interventions fail to consider the actions of public servants at the individual level and especially how cognitive biases shape their decisions to hire a consultant. This...

De Politiewet 2012 heeft geleid tot een landelijk politiekorps. Doel hiervan was om de politie efficiënter en effectiever te maken. De verwachting was dat met name rondom de bedrijfsvoering, zoals taken rond ICT, informatievoorziening, inkoop en HRM, veel schaalvoordelen te behalen waren. De Commissie Kuijken concludeerde in 2017 echter dat het toe...

The challenge in measuring governance is not just to identify relevant measures, but to then also make sense of these measures. This chapter proposes that both the researchers studying governance arrangements and the actors practically engaged in such arrangements would benefit from organizing collaborative performance summits. During a summit, act...

Interactive routines such as collaborative performance summits are thought to help collaborating organizations assess and improve their performance. However, there is little systematic evidence to substantiate this claim. This study leverages a longitudinal dataset to examine the summit process and identify the difference between summits that have...

Collaborative governance arrangements are frequently criticized for achieving collaboration at the expense of legitimacy and accountability. We explore the conditions under which legitimacy and accountability can occur in collaborative governance, ultimately aiming to discover whether collaborative arrangements can 'have it all', simultaneously bei...

Journalists, politicians, watchdog institutions, and public administration scholars devote considerable energy to identifying and dissecting failures in government. Studies and case-studies of policy, organizational and institutional failures in the public sector figure prominently in public administration curriculums and classrooms. Such a focus o...

Beleidsmakers willen maatschappelijke meerwaarde realiseren, maar in het evalueren van beleid zijn de instrumenten vooral gericht op het behalen van strak geformuleerde en meetbare doelen. Op basis van werksessies met verschillende afdelingen van het Ministerie van OCW, ontwikkelt dit essay een alternatief perspectief op het evalueren van beleid. D...

De twee kamers van mijn grootvader In het huis van mijn grootouders bestierde mijn grootvader twee ruimten: Zijn donkere kantoorkamer, met daarin een brede leren bureaustoel en groot stalen bureau, waar boven op strak in gelid een zilveren pen, aantekeningenblok en rekenmachine prijkten. Naar deze kamer werd je geroepen als je wat had uitgehaald. V...

Rekenkamer rapport over de kwaliteit van de jeugdzorg in Almere.

IMPACT The goal of this article is to identify evidence-based building blocks for smart and sensible practices of policy design, public leadership and management, while recognizing that universal templates for success are not the right approach. It is critical that strategies to improve governance show appropriate sensitivity to context. The author...

In this programmatic essay, we argue that public governance scholarship would benefit from developing a self-conscious and cohesive strand of “positive” scholarship, akin to social science subfields like positive psychology, positive organizational studies, and positive evaluation. We call for a program of research devoted to uncovering the factors...

Journalists, parliaments, watchdog institutions, and public administration scholars devote considerable energy to targeting and dissecting failures in government. Studies and case-studies of policy, organizational and institutional failures in the public sector have figured prominently in public administration curriculums and classrooms. Such a foc...

In geval van dreiging is het verleidelijk om de noodtoestand af te kondigen. Ofschoon de noodtoestand een juridische grondslag kent, is de uitwerking en doorwerking ervan niet op voorhand duidelijk. De auteurs laten zien dat de betekenis van noodmaatregelen van land tot land verschilt, en dat de noodtoestand vooral door politiek-bestuurlijke a...

Invented in 2008 with Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies represent a radical technological innovation in finance and banking; one which threatened to disrupt the existing regulatory regimes governing those sectors. This article examines, from a reputation management perspective, how regulatory agencies framed their response. Through a content analysis, we c...

Advancing the performance of collaborations requires not only shared performance indicators, but also shared performance routines. Collaborative performance summits offer partners a routine for jointly explicating goals, exchanging performance information, examining progress, and exploring actions. However, summits can easily devolve into pointless...

Purpose The principles of public value management (PVM) have greatly inspired public management practitioners and scholars, but the application of these ideas to the everyday practice and research of government has proven to be more difficult. This article formulates propositions for how the principles of PVM could affect one of the core processes...

The literature on collaborative governance has generated several comprehensive models detailing the conditions which collaborations must meet to achieve collaborative performance. The importance of each separate condition - such as the presence of incentives to participate, appropriate institutional designs, or facilitative leadership - has been va...

The ideas of Public Value Management have expanded the scope of ambitions and actors involved in government. Public, private, and community partners increasingly join forces to achieve societal outcomes. Yet the measures and processes for reviewing the impact of these collaborations have lagged behind. Reviews traditionally center on politicians ho...

From 2013 onwards, local governments in the Netherlands started to receive worrying reports from the national intelligence agency. Groups and individuals in their communities were developing into radical supporters of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The intelligence agency estimated that several thousand people in the Netherlands suppor...

Citizens and scholars excel in identifying and analyzing government failure. It is important indeed to understand public sector, but while governments in the Low Countries are doing well on average and very well from an internationally perspective, most attention is focused on the errors and mishaps. This article argues for a robust positive perspe...

Dit artikel verkent hoe we met behulp van het publieke waardeperspectief zicht kunnen krijgen op de kwaliteit van lokaal bestuur. Het publieke waardeperspectief beoordeelt de overheid niet op basis van algemene standaarden of benchmarks, maar via de oordelen van betrokken actoren. Deze benadering doet in potentie meer recht aan de unieke, lokale co...

Citizens and scholars excel in identifying and analyzing government failure. It is important indeed to understand public sector, but while governments in the Low Countries are doing well on average and very well from an internationally perspective, most attention is focused on the errors and mishaps. This article argues for a robust positive perspe...

On behalf of the mayor of Arnhem, an interdisciplinary research team of Utrecht University evaluated the local anti-radicalization program in the city of Arnhem. The report maps the social network and contacts between the local partners, measures the knowledge and skills of the street-level professionals involved, and evaluates the the inter-organi...

It is attractive to frame societal challenges such as climate change, terrorism and migration as ‘wicked issues’. Wickedness theory in its various guises has become popular as it connects the uncertain and political nature of issues with hopeful strategies for strengthening networks, trust and learning. In this paper we take a critical approach tow...

The concept of public value has expanded the ambition of public organizations, encouraging them to create desirable societal outcomes together with stakeholders (Moore, 1995; Williams and Shearer, 2011). However, different tasks and different stakeholders prioritize different dimensions of value. Public organizations have to satisfy competing deman...

Public administration-as a field of both academic study and professional practice-would benefit greatly from a more systematic and cohesive strand of research that is explicitly geared towards systematically studying the successes and positive contributions of government. At present, the citizenry at large is ill-informed about what government does...

This report summarizes the research finding of our Successful Local Government Project. We used the public value framework to analyze the local definitions of value, strategic practices, and stakeholder assessments of six highly successful local governments in the Netherlands.

This study commissioned by the Scientific Research and Documentation Center (WODC) of the Dutch Ministriy of Justice and Security analyses the experiences of Western-particularly Western European-countries upon declaring a state of emergency in response to terrorist threats. Its purpose is to identify relevant lessons that the Netherlands can learn...

Wicked problems present major challenges for evaluation as they cross the boundaries between countries, policy domains, organizations, and scientific disciplines. They force evaluators to study large networks in order to trace extended chains of cause and effect. However, beyond this category of ‘regular’ wicked problems that cross boundaries, ther...

Public value management encourages public organizations to move beyond existing frameworks and create value in flexible collaboration with societal partners. However, this approach creates problems for the accountability processes, because reports to politicians are often still directed at quantitative goals and rigid frameworks. This creates uncer...

Innovative public management practices can greatly benefit citizens, but often fail due to a mismatch with the societal context. Public Value Management was developed in North America and Western Europe, emphasising public leadership, stakeholder involvement, and information sharing. This article examines whether these practices advocated in resili...

The tools of public value management – such as the strategic triangle and the public value account – are increasingly used by scholars and practitioners alike. At the same time, some confusion remains regarding their functionality in action. Based on our experiences with these tools in classrooms and boardrooms, we analyse how these instruments hel...

There is considerable scholarly writing about the theory and application of public value concepts, but this article explores why there is, by contrast, so little empirical research on public value. The article then goes on to provide a framework and a research agenda for inspiring and guiding new empirical research, based on three different concept...

This essay reviews the development of public value management, tracing its rise from relative obscurity in the 1990s to the global attention it receives today. We also introduce the accompanying essays in this symposium which aim to spur further development in the years to come. We review the main tenets of public value management and highlight the...

Evaluation of the Dutch counterterrorism strategy between 2011-2015, on behalf of the Dutch Ministry of Security & Justice. The report evaluates the effects of the national strategy on the intervention capacity of the government partners against the terrorist threat, covering the strategic plans, collaboration practices, and local government approa...

This article examines to what extent transparency is a condition for the creation of public value. Transparency is usually narrowly defined as a tool for external stakeholders to monitor the internal workings of an organization, but public value management positions transparency as a broader instrument for actively engaging stakeholders. We investi...

Zorg-en welzijnsorganisaties moeten op meerdere dimensies waarde leveren. Zorg moet bijvoorbeeld kwalitatief hoogstaand én kosteneffectief én legitiem zijn. De vraag is hoe een instelling deze botsende dimensies kan inbedden in een heldere organisatiestructurering. We schetsen vier opties: 1) scheiden van de verschillende waardedimensies in zelfsta...

Winning entry for an essay contest on 'How to change the world?'. This essay was featured alongside contributions of Margaret Atwood, Alan Bodiou, John Gray, and other international intellectuals.

Every government faces its own particular challenges. For a small-scale democracy, the size of its society might be the obvious limitation. Most discussion about small societies thus focuses on the governance failures caused by this small size. This book argues that it would be more useful to explore the governance successes that also occur. Based...

A large part of the study of politics is dedicated to identifying the circumstances under which democracy will flourish. Putnam made a major contribution to this field through his concept of social capital as developed in Making Democracy Work. Putnam found that communities with a high number of civic associations –i.e. social capital- had a better...