Naar een Vergelijkende Bestuurskunde van de 27

Rede, uitgesproken op 28 juni 2012 bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van Persoonlijk Hoogleraar ‘Vergelijkende Bestuurskunde’ bij de opleiding Bestuurskunde van de Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen van de Erasmus Universiteit Rotterda

Building Resilience in Public Organizations: The Role of Waste and Bricolage

__Abstract__ This paper shows how organizational waste and processes of bricolage have an important role in the functioning of public organizations, and how this is essential to innovation, organisational resilience and survival. This paper largely builds on the work of organisation theorist Karl E. Weick and his work on bricolage and improvisation more specifically. The paper is conceptual in nature, and outlines the characteristics of the concept of bricolage, and the organisational requirements for bricolage to emerge and flourish. It shows how organisations that are over-proceduralised or over-organised leave little space for the emergence of solutions and actions. This has negative consequences for organisational learning and for innovation, and, ultimately, for organizations’ capability to deal with crises. Organisational memory, a certain degree of discretion, waste and redundancy are crucial for organisations’ long-term survival

The role of trust in public services and public sector reform

__Abstract__ The balance between trust and distrust is shifting – yet again. The move towards public sector reforms inspired by the New Public Management (NPM) from the 1980s on introduced a series of innovations based on mutual distrust between public sector actors. More recently, the concept of trust has gone through a veritable renaissance, and is now regarded as an essential feature of any kind of collaboration. At the same time, public distrust towards government and public administration has remained solidly on the agenda. In this chapter, we discuss the role of trust in the public sector. We first focus on the promise of public sector reforms to restore citizen trust through improving services and through aligning public services with citizen demands. We then further explore the basic premise of this promise, namely that citizens distrust public services and public administration, by providing comparative data on public trust. In the subsequent two sections, we introduce readers to the roles of trust and distrust in the public sector and in the relation between citizens and government, before moving on to contrasting citizen trust in public officials to public officials’ trust in citizens. The penultimate section shows how trust has recently re-emerged as a key concept in public administration practice and scholarship, facilitating interaction and reducing the cost of transactions. We end with a short summary

Kan er iets geregeld worden? Corruptie bij de overheid in cijfers

In Vlaanderen valt altijd wel iets te regelen. Sjoemelen is het niet, maar iemand kennen die iemand kent komt steeds van pas. In dit artikel lichten we het bestaande cijfermateriaal door met de bedoeling een beeld te krijgen van de perceptie die leeft bij de burger over de omvang van corruptie in België en Vlaanderen. We geven de status-quo mee, en gaan na welke tendensen vast te stellen zijn. Eerst gaan we na hoe de perceptie van corruptie zich in ons land situeert ten opzichte van andere landen binnen de EU. Vervolgens kijken we hoe deze percepties zijn geëvolueerd, waarna we dieper ingaan op de redenen die burgers aanhalen wanneer ze zich uitspreken over corruptie bij overheidsdiensten. Het beschikbare materiaal is erg beperkt, zodat we een vrij exhaustief overzicht kunnen meegeven

Trust in the justice system: A comparative view across Europe

The justice system is not one of the most trusted institutions in the UK. While most citizens consider it fair, they also think it is out of touch in specific cases, and many consider it relatively inefficient. The UK is not alone. Many governments throughout Europe and the wider world are worried about low levels of public trust in the justice system. These worries are reignited with every (minor) scandal or heavily mediatised case

New Public Management: Restoring the Public Trust through Creating Distrust?

Policy makers frequently invoked restoring the public sector’s legitimacy as one of the main motivations for public sector reform in the 1980s and ‘90s. Low or declining public trust in government and a decline of the public sector’s legitimacy (perceived or real) became a central motivation for public sector reform efforts, notably NPM-style reforms. In this chapter we first show how trust and legitimacy entered the reform agenda and became important motivations for public sector reform programmes in the 1990s. Creating congruence between what public services citizens really wanted and the services the public sector provided was seen as the key to regaining the public trust. In this first part, we also examine whether the basic assumption of declining trust was correct and whether NPM reforms have eventually contributed to restoring trust. In a second part, we elaborate on the apparent irony that NPM wanted to re-establish the public trust by introducing distrust-based control and compliance mechanisms. We show that this is not necessarily a contradiction by distinguishing between three different types of trust and by outlining NPM’s effect on these three types of trust. We end by discussing the re-emergence of trust-based steering concepts in public management

What services are public? What aspects of performance are to be ranked? The case of “services of general interest”

In this article, we focus on the difficulties in evaluating the performance of so-called services of general interest. These services generally include such services as water and electricity supply, telephony, postal services, and public transport, where providers are subjected to certain universal service obligations. Because of the tensions between European internal market requirements and these universal service obligations, there exists considerable debate on the criteria to be used to evaluate the performance of these services. In addition, the status of these public services as ‘public’ or ‘essential’ services is disputed. Rankings of the performance of these services will always reflect a certain dominant definition of performance. Ranking schemes as a result both reflect and create performance

Overheidsmanagement: België Holland

__Abstract__ Nederland is lang gezien als ‘gidsland’, ook voor overheidsmanagement. In deze bijdrage wordt de achtergrond bij recente hervormingen in het Nederlandse openbare bestuur geschetst en wordt een korte evaluatie van de gevolgen van deze hervormingen gemaakt. Het gaat namelijk niet enkel om puur technische hervormingen, maar ze hebben ook belangrijke, en misschien niet altijd wenselijke, implicaties voor de rol van de overheid in de maatschappij, de verhoudingen tussen politiek en administratie en de verhouding tussen centraal en lokaal bestuur

Perceptions of corruption as distrust? Cause and effect in attitudes towards government

In the first section we briefly present some of the available survey material on citizens’ perception of public sector corruption in Belgium. Using data from a general survey administered in Flanders (Northern part of Belgium) in 2003, we subsequently analyze determinants of general perceptions of corruption and unethical behavior. We show that these perceptions are to a large extent influenced by feelings of political alienation and general attitudes towards government. It is therefore difficult to distinguish cause and effect between trust in government and perceptions of corruption. We then will show that general perceptions of corruption should not be seen as an expression of individual experience. Parallels become apparent with how citizens evaluate government services, where a disconnection seems to exist between generally positive personal bureaucratic encounters and more negative attitudes towards public services in general. We end by reviewing possibilities for avoiding ‘contamination’ of perceptions of corruption by general attitudes towards government, and for developing indicators that better measure actual corruption

International comparisons of public sector performance: how to move ahead?

Measuring and comparing the overall performance of countries’ public sectors requires agreement on definitions and objectives of government. I argue that such an agreement is about finding a consensus rather about finding better definitions. Measuring government requires a number of leaps of faith, where certain definitions, assumptions and statistics are accepted as good enough for measurement and comparison. The political science and economic research community have a different tradition of dealing with such agreements and leaps of faith, and this is reflected in their approaches to measuring and comparing the performance of public sectors. The implications of these traditions are particularly visible in the usefulness of measurement and indicators for policy makers