Institutions Matter – Governance Makes Difference : Making of Diversity and Antidiscrimination Policy – the Dutch and the UK Case

It is often argued that new forms of governance, such as market and network, undermine the state. The state is handing over powers to supranational level, the EU, to the local level, in the name of decentralisation, and to the administration, to increase the over all effectiveness of provision of public goods. This paper argues that the state however plays a very crucial role, through representing different paths of institutional solutions in policy making. The main question is to what extent and how the institutional setting and the governance tradition of a state affects the process and policy contents in the field of antidiscrimination policies. Here, the Dutch and the UK cases represent two different traditions of policy governance. While the former follows the path of corporativist institutional solution the latter is known for its state-centred pluralistic model. The question is how this affects the formulation of antidiscrimination policy and implementation of the EU antidiscrimination policy. The paper draws on empirical materials such as documentation and interviews, but also research on policy making in the Netherlands and in the UK generally and in particular in the field of ethnic relations. After a short overview of EU legislative developments, the case of the Netherlands will be discussed, followed by an examination of the UK developments.In the electronic version the ISSN is changed to the correct one