De Sociale Pijler, ambities en praktijken van het grotestedenbeleid

In the nineties of the twentieth century the public debate on social policy in the Netherlands was mainly connected to the new “major cities policy” (“grotestedenbeleid”). The social agenda of this period – due to a flourishing economy – shifted from classical topics such as unemployment and poverty to issues such as the integration of immigrants and the “liveability” of neighbourhoods in major cities. Government efforts to combat these problems were both criticized and stimulated by a coalition of politicians, civil servants, academics and advisors who focused on ways to improve the current practice via client-, goal- and result-oriented policy-methods. On the verge of the new millennium, however, a more radical line of criticism emerged. Departing from a similar set of social questions, it reasoned that current governmental efforts were not so much the solution, but more the cause of the problems. The lack of “results” was directly linked to the way government operated and therefore the critics explicitly argued for a fundamental change in not only policy actions, but also in the structure of policy and government itself. The change of perspective on current governmental efforts from “worth improving” to “totally inept” led to a growing personal discontent; a discontent that eventually led the author to write this book. The book starts with a description of the Dutch debate on social policy around the turn of the century. This section concludes with establishing that the combination of stable empirical claims and changing normative judgments calls for more research into the “reality of social policy”; a reality that is to be found at the local level. The next part of the book comprises three chapters describing (1) integration-policy in Gouda, (2) immigrant-citizenship-policy in Amsterdam and (3) major-cities-policy in Emmen. Despite differences in the nature of the policies, the cities and the particular circumstances, the three cases generate a common picture about the reality of everyday social policy. In this reality we witness governmental actors and their partners executing their day-to-day activities under difficult and complex circumstances. The social problems they have to tackle seem to be both intangible and unchangeable, and the instruments they have to their disposal to intervene are weak. Furthermore, they perform their jobs under organisational constraints, such as competing departments, policy fields, budget-claims and politicians. The third part of the book analyzes to what extent the general and specific insights generated from the cases can be explained via concepts from relevant academic literature. This shows that they fit rather well into a comprehensive theoretical framework that stresses ambiguity, ambivalence, wicked problems, non-rational elements in decision making and acting. It demonstrates evidence for a realist-pessimist perspective on institutional acting and coping with structural constraints in public policy – especially in the social field –, rather than an optimist perspective, focusing on policy as problem solving. In the final section of the book, the fundamental question of the value of social policy-making under these unpromising circumstances is raised and tentatively answered