Governance
Who decides, with which instruments, by which rules, and for whom?
Governance: systems, processes, and institutions by which communities are organised and ruled in multi-stakeholder processes involving civil society, the public sector, and the private sector.
Government is one actor in governance, often the most powerful, never the only one. No single actor can deliver the energy transition of your Q3 region. Ministries set targets, the national grid operator builds lines, provinces and municipalities grant permits, farmers own the land, cooperatives raise money, residents object, vote and sometimes invest. Governance is the name for how all of this is held together, or fails to be.
This page gives you the concepts. Session 05 works with them in class: hierarchy, market and network, multi-level governance, and the four tools of metagovernance are introduced there and not repeated here.
Three ways to use one word
Governance is used in three ways, often in the same paragraph: to describe what is happening, to analyse how it works, and to say how it should be. Reports get muddled when the three are mixed without notice. Keep them apart, and you will know what kind of evidence each sentence needs.
Since the 1980s, governing in Western Europe has moved from a state that commands towards networks of public, private and civic actors who depend on each other (Rhodes, 1996; Stoker, 1998).
Watch out. Others show that the state has not been replaced: it governs through networks, and often steers them (Bell & Hindmoor, 2009). Treat the shift as a question to check in your region.
In your report: Your analysis: who actually shapes the energy landscape of your region today.
Governance as a lens: actors, the formal and informal rules they follow, the resources they hold, and the interactions between them (Kooiman, 2003). Ostrom (2005) offers a framework for studying the rules actually in use, which are often different from the rules on paper.
Watch out. A list of fifty actors is a phone book. The analysis starts when you show relations: who depends on whom, who can block whom.
In your report: Your methods and analysis: stakeholder analysis, policy analysis, power mapping.
From the 1990s, development agencies promoted “good governance” (World Bank, 1992; UNDP, 1997). Critics found the lists of reforms too long and too uniform, and argued for “good enough governance” fitted to context (Grindle, 2004). In democracies, the deeper test is legitimacy (section 08).
Watch out. Normative claims are welcome in a planning report. Make them explicit, and say whose values they express.
In your report: Your vision, strategy, evaluation and ethics reflection.
Four invented sentences about a Q3 region. Decide, then open.
“The regional energy strategy has no legal powers of its own: every decision still passes through municipal councils.”Think first, then open +
A claim about how things are, which evidence can confirm or refute. Session 05 discusses the same point for the thirty energy regions.
“We map who holds land, money, legal authority and information in the region, and who depends on whom.”Think first, then open +
A way of looking that organises your evidence. It does not yet say what is good or bad.
“Communities that host a substation should have a decisive say over where it goes.”Think first, then open +
A claim about how things should be. Defend it with values and arguments, then test it against evidence about consequences.
“Participation in our region improved, because more residents came to the information evenings.”Think first, then open +
It looks descriptive, but it hides a standard: that attendance is what good participation means. Arnstein (1969) would ask what residents could change. Make the standard explicit or the claim misleads.
The governance triangle
The governance triangle is a simple tool for seeing who governs. Three sectors produce urban space together: civil society, the public sector and the private sector. They act inside institutions: the formal rules of the rule of law, held in turn inside the informal norms and practices of a society. The arrows run both ways, because each sector shapes the others and is shaped by them. The triangle works in two ways. Descriptively, it asks who is present and how strong each corner is. Prescriptively, it asks for balance: a strong, free civil society keeps the state and the market in check.
Civil society+
Non-governmental and not-for-profit organisations that facilitate civic engagement: associations of citizens around common objectives, to learn, claim, help each other, protest, discuss and plan.
In a Q3 region: Energy cooperatives, residents’ associations, nature organisations, farmers’ unions, local action groups against a high-voltage route.
Public sector+
Government organisations that provide services and enforce policies at multiple levels.
In a Q3 region: Ministries, provinces, municipalities, water boards, agencies, the regulator; and the national grid operator TenneT, a company owned by the state.
Private sector+
Businesses and organisations that are privately owned, operating for profit.
In a Q3 region: Wind and solar developers, energy companies, landowners leasing fields, industry in the port clusters, banks.
Formal institutions+
Established rules and systems that are officially codified, often through laws, regulations or constitutions, and enforced by recognised authorities such as governments or legal bodies. Examples: courts, laws, government agencies.
In a Q3 region: The Environment and Planning Act (Omgevingswet), in force since 1 January 2024, which bundles 26 earlier laws (Raad van State, n.d.); zoning in the municipal environmental plan; grid connection rules.
Informal institutions+
Unwritten norms, conventions and social practices that govern behaviour but are not officially enforced. They rely on social expectations, traditions or cultural practices, such as family roles, customs or peer pressure.
In a Q3 region: Section 03 is about them.
The extended triangle: the planet and future generations+
The planet: an interconnected system of ecosystems that sustains life, and a stakeholder with intrinsic value, deserving care, ethical treatment and conservation, to keep ecological balance and the well-being of current and future generations.
Future generations: human and non-human stakeholders in long-term sustainability, warranting ethical consideration of intergenerational justice and the fair distribution of resources.
Neither can sit at the table. Some legal systems have tried to give them a representative.
The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 requires Welsh public bodies to set well-being objectives, and creates a Future Generations Commissioner who promotes the sustainable development principle and monitors whether those objectives are met (Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, Part 3).
New Zealand’s Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 recognises the Whanganui River as a legal person, with appointed guardians who speak for it. The arrangement grew from the relationship of the Whanganui iwi with the river.
The eleven principles of effective governance for sustainable development, prepared by the UN Committee of Experts on Public Administration and endorsed by ECOSOC in July 2018, include intergenerational equity (UN DESA, n.d.; Bouckaert et al., n.d.).
A landing point for offshore wind cables is planned on a stretch of coast. Who speaks for the North Sea, and for the people who will live there in 2080?Think first, then open +
No one holds that seat. Proxies exist: environmental assessment, nature organisations, scientists, sometimes a court. Ask of each proxy whether it has power over the decision or only a voice in it. Invented example.
A sister triangle: socio-technical systems+
The same drawing appears in transition studies. Here the corners are actors (individuals, organisations and institutions that influence social and technical change), technologies (tools, machines, software or methods that make human activity possible or constrain it) and institutions (formal and informal rules, norms and organisations that shape how actors and technologies interact).
Energy systems are socio-technical: a grid is cables, and also tariffs, connection rules and habits. Read more on the socio-technical transitions page.
Draw it for your region with the governance triangle worksheet in the Toolkit: is it balanced, who holds power, and who are the silent stakeholders?
The rules of the game
Institutions are the rules of the game that structure human interaction: formal rules such as laws and constitutions, and informal ones such as norms and conventions (North, 1990). Planners read the formal rules well. The informal ones, the ingrained world-views and habits that decide how people relate to each other, to the state and to the law, often decide whether a plan works.
Informal institutions are socially shared rules, usually unwritten, that are created, communicated and enforced outside officially sanctioned channels (Helmke & Levitsky, 2004). They differ from simple habits because breaking them brings a sanction: gossip, exclusion, loss of trust.
Rules in use: what Ostrom saw
Elinor Ostrom spent her career studying how people actually govern what they share: pastures, forests, fisheries, irrigation water. Against the common view that shared resources are always overused unless a state controls them or a market privatises them, she found communities that had built their own rules, watched each other and punished cheats, sometimes for centuries (Ostrom, 1990).
Her lesson for planners is direct. The rules that decide whether a plan works are often the rules people use, which may differ from the rules on paper. Find them before you design.
Rules in form are written down. Rules in use are those people know, follow and enforce. Ostrom (2005) asks researchers to find the second kind. A useful interview question: what happens when someone breaks this rule?
Many people are conditional cooperators: they cooperate when they expect others to do the same. Trust, reciprocity and reputation reinforce each other, and when one collapses, collective action collapses with it (Ostrom, 2000).
Communities can govern shared resources without a state imposing rules or a market pricing the resource, when the users themselves craft, monitor and enforce the rules (Ostrom, 1990).
Ostrom (1990) compared commons that lasted with those that failed and found eight conditions that the lasting ones shared. Open each principle; the examples apply it to an invented village energy cooperative.
1 · Clear boundaries+Who has rights to the resource, and where are its edges?Open
Users and the resource are clearly defined, so everyone knows who may take part and what is shared.
Invented example: Who may become a member of a village energy cooperative, and which turbine and land it owns.
2 · Rules that fit the place+Do the rules match local conditions?Open
Rules about use and contribution fit the local situation, and the benefits people receive match what they put in.
Invented example: Profits shared per household rather than per kilowatt-hour, so that tenants who use little energy still benefit.
3 · Those affected make the rules+Who can change the rules?Open
Most of the people bound by the rules can take part in changing them.
Invented example: Members vote on tariffs and on where a new solar field goes at the general meeting.
4 · Monitoring+Who watches?Open
Those who monitor use and behaviour are users themselves, or accountable to them.
Invented example: Members elect their own auditor, who reports to the general meeting.
5 · Graduated sanctions+What happens to cheats?Open
People who break the rules face sanctions that grow with the seriousness of the breach and with repetition.
Invented example: A reminder, then a fine, and exclusion only for repeated non-payment.
6 · Cheap conflict resolution+Where do disputes go?Open
Users have quick, low-cost local arenas to settle conflicts among themselves or with officials.
Invented example: A members’ committee settles a dispute about noise compensation before anyone goes to court.
7 · Recognised right to organise+Do the authorities let them?Open
External governments recognise the users’ right to make their own rules.
Invented example: The municipality accepts the cooperative as a partner in the Regional Energy Strategy instead of overruling it.
8 · Nested enterprises+How does it scale up?Open
In larger systems, rule-making, monitoring and enforcement are organised in several nested layers.
Invented example: Village cooperatives join a regional and a national federation, which negotiate on their behalf.
Villagers have managed alpine meadows and forests as a commons for centuries, with rules on how many cows each household may send up in summer.
Village commons of forest and meadow, governed by detailed rules on who may harvest what, and when.
Irrigation communities in Spain that share water by their own rules and settle disputes in their own tribunals.
Farmers’ irrigation societies that build and maintain their own dams and canals and share the work and the water.
Cases from Ostrom (1990), chapter 3.
Is a Dutch water board an Ostrom institution?Think first, then open +
Water boards grew out of the struggle against water; the oldest, Rijnland, dates from 1255 (Parlement.com, n.d.-e). Today they are public bodies that levy their own tax, with a chair, the dijkgraaf, appointed by the Crown, and residents have had seats on their boards since 1992 (Parlement.com, n.d.-e). Our reading: rules made by users, later formalised and nested in the state, much as Ostrom’s eighth principle describes.
Does trust always help planning?Think first, then open +
Trust lowers the cost of agreements, but it is trust among members. Ostrom’s first principle, clear boundaries, also means that someone is outside. Ask who belongs to the trusted circle in your region, and who does not.
Helmke and Levitsky (2004) sort informal institutions along two questions: are the formal institutions effective, and do the informal rules lead to the same outcomes as the formal ones or to different ones?
Examples and their placement as given by Helmke and Levitsky (2004), who draw on the authors they review. They note that clientelism can also act as a substitute where the state fails to deliver.
The polder model
Ask a Dutch planner how decisions are made and you will hear about the polder model: the habit of bringing every organised party to the table and talking until there is an agreement all can live with. No law requires it. Yet ignoring it carries a price, from delays and objections to lost trust. That makes it an informal institution in Helmke and Levitsky’s sense.
The name points to a popular explanation: in a polder below sea level, rivals depend on the same dikes and pumps, so they must cooperate. Treat that as a founding story more than a proven cause. The history below is better documented.
The Hoogheemraadschap van Rijnland is founded, the oldest water board in the country (Parlement.com, n.d.-e).
Catholics, Protestants, socialists and liberals live in separate pillars, while their leaders negotiate at the top. Lijphart (1968) calls it the politics of accommodation.
In May, employers and unions found a joint consultation body, so that both share responsibility for post-war reconstruction. The Wassenaar Agreement is later signed here (Parlement.com, n.d.-d).
The Social and Economic Council: employers, unions and independent Crown members advise the government (Parlement.com, n.d.-c).
Unions accept wage restraint in exchange for shorter working hours (Parlement.com, n.d.-a).
Strong job growth, attributed to consultation between unions, employers and government, draws international attention to the model (Visser & Hemerijck, 1997).
Government, local authorities and societal partners negotiate the Climate Agreement at five sector tables (Stimuleringsfonds Volkshuisvesting Nederlandse gemeenten, 2018). Our reading: the Regional Energy Strategies continue that logic.
Problems are defined as shared and solved together by organised parties: unions and employers, water boards and farmers, municipalities and energy cooperatives. No single actor is expected to solve them alone.
Ask: Who in your region is organised enough to sit at the table, and who is not?
Parties expect that institutions such as the SER, the water boards and the courts are fair and will keep their word. That trust makes agreements cheaper to reach and easier to keep.
Ask: Is that trust present in your region, or has it been broken, as in Groningen?
Decisions are reached by consultation and compromise until all parties can accept them, and not by majority alone. The Netherlands is usually classed as a consensus democracy (Hendriks & Toonen, 2001).
Ask: Who can block a consensus in your region, and who never gets the chance?
- Slow and sticky. Contributors to Polder Politics write of institutional sclerosis and a viscous state (Hendriks & Toonen, 2001).
- Insiders and outsiders. Consensus among organised parties can leave tenants, newcomers, young people and future generations outside the room.
- Conflict moves out of sight. When everything is settled at the table, disagreement leaves the public arena. See Session 05 on agonism.
- Broken trust. Groningen shows what happens when faith in institutions is betrayed (Parlementaire enquêtecommissie aardgaswinning Groningen, 2023).
Ostrom and the polder. Our reading: the polder model works like a well-run commons, with clear membership, mutual monitoring and trust built over time. Its weakness is the same as a commons’: those without membership. Which of Helmke and Levitsky’s four types above fits it best? Test yourself below.
Place each one in a box, then open. The answers are our reading: argue with them.
The polder model
Collective action · consensus seeking · faith in institutions. See the panel above.Where would you place it? Open +
Collective action · consensus seeking · faith in institutions. See the panel above.
Our reading: the habit of seeking consensus helps formal institutions work, from water boards to the regional energy strategies. Its shadow side is worth naming too: consensus among organised parties can leave the unorganised outside the room.
Minga
Community action to tackle common problems in Ecuador. Collective local action · mutual trust · goodwill · sharing.Where would you place it? Open +
Community action to tackle common problems in Ecuador. Collective local action · mutual trust · goodwill · sharing.
Our reading: where public services are thin, minga gets done what the state does not, which makes it substitutive. Where municipalities work with it, it becomes complementary. The type depends on the formal institutions around it, not on the practice alone.
Omertà
An extreme form of loyalty and solidarity in the face of authority. Blind loyalty to family or clan · distrust of state authority · affirmation of masculinity.Where would you place it? Open +
An extreme form of loyalty and solidarity in the face of authority. Blind loyalty to family or clan · distrust of state authority · affirmation of masculinity.
Our reading: a code of silence sets up a rival system of obligation against the law. Planning instruments that assume people will report, testify or trust public agencies fail where such codes hold.
Six more, from planning, anthropology and political science. Open each one, then try to place it in one of the four boxes. The answer may depend on the formal institutions around it.
Blat · Russia+
An economy of favours: using personal networks to obtain goods, jobs and permits that the Soviet planned economy failed to deliver, and the habits it left behind (Ledeneva, 1998).
For planning: Where permits and services are scarce, whoever has connections gets them first. Ask who in your region knows whom at the municipality.
Gotong royong · Indonesia+
Mutual assistance among villagers. Bowen (1986) shows how the state took up the term to claim villagers’ labour for public works, so that a local tradition became a tool of national authority.
For planning: Community traditions can be captured. When a plan invokes “community”, ask who defined it and who benefits from the unpaid work.
Harambee · Kenya+
“Let us pull together”: self-help fundraising for schools, clinics and water projects. Ngau (1987) examines the tensions within it as a vehicle of empowerment.
For planning: Self-help can build public goods and political clientelism at the same time.
Jeitinho · Brazil+
An informal way of solving problems by bending or breaking rules, resting on personal sympathy and social capital, used to get things done inside bureaucracies (Duarte, 2006).
For planning: Rules on paper and rules in use can differ widely. Your interviews will find the second kind.
Urban informality · Global South and beyond+
Roy (2005) argues that informality is a mode of urbanisation, often produced and used by the state itself, which decides what to tolerate, regularise or demolish. It is not a property of the poor alone.
For planning: Ask who has the power to declare something informal, and to whom that power is applied.
The huerta irrigation tribunals · Valencia, Spain+
Farmers’ rules for sharing irrigation water, enforced by their own institutions for centuries. Ostrom (1990) uses them to show how long-lasting rules for a commons can be devised by the users themselves.
For planning: Long-lived informal rules can become formal ones. See the commons page.
Ask residents, not documents. Do people here trust the water board, the municipality, the grid operator? Who do they call when something goes wrong? In Groningen, a parliamentary inquiry concluded that the interests of residents had been structurally ignored during gas extraction (Parlementaire enquêtecommissie aardgaswinning Groningen, 2023). Distrust built over decades is an informal institution any new energy project there meets first.
What actors govern with
Power in governance rests on resources. A simple triangle of resources names three: finances, policy tools, and information, communication and time. Christopher Hood’s classic account of the tools of government names four: nodality (being at the centre of information), authority, treasure and organisation (Hood & Margetts, 2007). The two lists overlap. In spatial planning, add one resource that both treat lightly: land.
Investment and incentives · equity and accessibility · leveraging further investment.
Hood’s term: Treasure
Regulation and enforcement · planning and zoning · legislative influence · access to decision-making.
Hood’s term: Authority
Information sharing and transparency · communication channels and civil-society networks · time, as the pace and timeliness of decisions.
Hood’s term: Nodality
Four actors from a Q3 region. Our reading, written for this page: yours may differ for your region.
National government
Which resources does this actor hold, and which does it lack?Think first, then open +
Which resources does this actor hold, and which does it lack?
Holds. Authority: national programmes, national coordination of large energy projects, the Environment and Planning Act. Finance: subsidies and budgets. Information: national data and models.
Lacks. Local knowledge, and the trust of the places that host the projects.
A province
Which resources does this actor hold, and which does it lack?Think first, then open +
Which resources does this actor hold, and which does it lack?
Holds. Authority: the provincial environmental vision and rules for municipalities. Information: regional overviews. Some finance.
Lacks. Control over the grid and over land.
An energy cooperative
Which resources does this actor hold, and which does it lack?Think first, then open +
Which resources does this actor hold, and which does it lack?
Holds. Organisation: members, volunteers, local trust. Some finance from members’ shares.
Lacks. Grid capacity, legal authority, and often the time and expertise that formal procedures demand.
Farmers who own the fields
Which resources does this actor hold, and which does it lack?Think first, then open +
Which resources does this actor hold, and which does it lack?
Holds. Land: the decisive resource for a solar park or a substation. The ability to say no.
Lacks. A seat in the regional strategy, unless they are organised.
Who holds which resources shapes all three dimensions of spatial justice: who gets what (distribution), who takes part in deciding (procedure) and whose knowledge and identity count (recognition). Draw the matrix with actors in the columns and resources in the rows, and the uneven ticks will show you where to look. See spatial justice.
Many levels, one territory
Gary Marks coined the term multi-level governance to describe European structural policy, in which decisions are negotiated continuously among governments at supranational, national, regional and local levels, rather than held by states alone (Marks, 1993). Authority has since moved up to the European Union, down to regions and cities, and sideways to agencies and partnerships (Hooghe & Marks, 2001). For a Q3 project this means that every intervention you propose is touched by rules and money from several levels at once. Open each level, from the widest to the closest.
InternationalSets goals that states commit to+
European UnionBinding law, money and non-binding strategy+
NationalTargets, laws and national choices+
ProvinceThe regional frame+
MunicipalityPlans, permits and the closest elected government+
Neighbourhood and communityWhere the decisions land+
The levels are nested, as the indentation shows; the Q3 examples are general and should be checked for your region.
Some bodies follow a task, not a territory. Water boards, with their own elections and taxes; the thirty regional energy strategy regions; grid operators, which remained in public hands when supply was opened to the market (Dessing et al., 2013); cross-border regions. Hooghe and Marks (2003) call these Type II jurisdictions, next to the nested Type I levels above. Session 05 works through the difference.
When a decision needs the agreement of several levels, each can block the others. Outcomes stall, or settle on the lowest common denominator (Scharpf, 1988).
When responsibility is spread over many levels and partners, citizens cannot tell whom to hold to account (Papadopoulos, 2007).
A problem arises at one scale and authority sits at another. Choosing the scale of decision is itself a political move: whoever moves a decision up or down a level changes who can influence it (Brenner, 2004).
Four Q3 situations. Decide, then open.
A wind farm near a Natura 2000 site waits for its nature permit.Think first, then open +
The Habitats Directive sets the test. Since the 2019 ruling, a permit needs a proper appropriate assessment of the effects on the protected site. The permit itself is usually granted by the province.
Your region must show where wind and solar can get permits faster.Think first, then open +
The EU sets the obligation and the deadline. How it is implemented, and which level designates the areas, is decided nationally.
A farm field is to become a solar park.Think first, then open +
The municipal environmental plan decides, within provincial rules and the national preference order for solar energy (step 3 of the problem statement page discusses the zonneladder).
A new business park cannot get a grid connection.Think first, then open +
Grid operators and the national regulator ACM decide who connects and in which order (section 06). The rules sit inside European energy law.
Metagovernance for sustainability
Session 05 introduced metagovernance, the governance of governance (Jessop, 1998), and the four tools a metagovernor uses (Sørensen & Torfing, 2009). Louis Meuleman takes the idea to sustainability. His argument: no governance style works everywhere. Hierarchy, networks and markets each succeed in some contexts and fail in others, and governance failure often comes from applying one style to everything. Sustainable development, with its long horizons and many levels, needs a deliberate, context-specific mix of styles, designed and managed over time (Meuleman, 2008, 2018).
Good at. Legal certainty, protection of rights, clear responsibility, speed where authority is accepted.
Fails when. Rigid and slow to learn; blind to local knowledge; produces resistance when imposed on unwilling places.
Q3 example. National coordination of high-voltage projects; the 2030 and 2050 targets in the Climate Act.
Good at. Combining knowledge, building commitment, dealing with interdependence.
Fails when. Slow; accountability gets lost among many hands; the unorganised stay outside.
Q3 example. The thirty regional energy strategies (Session 05).
Good at. Efficiency, innovation, signals through prices.
Fails when. Ignores what has no price; rewards those who can pay or arrive first.
Q3 example. Grid capacity allocated first come, first served.
Until 2024, scarce capacity on a congested Dutch grid went to whoever asked first. In April 2024 the regulator ACM changed the rules: in congested areas, grid operators may give priority to projects that relieve congestion, to safety (defence, police, acute care) and to basic needs (drinking water, housing, education). Applicants have to prove they qualify, and the framework has been mandatory since 1 October 2024 (ACM, 2024). A market-like rule was replaced by a hierarchical one, set by a public authority, with public values written into it. Who decided which needs count as basic is a question for your analysis.
Three Q3 tasks. Choose a mix of styles, then open. Our reading.
Deciding the route of a new high-voltage line through three municipalities.Think first, then open +
Someone must be able to decide, or the line is never built. A network phase before the decision lets places shape the route and the terms, and makes the decision easier to accept.
Allocating scarce capacity on a full grid.Think first, then open +
This is what the ACM did in 2024. The question that remains is who sets the priorities, and how the choice can be contested.
Getting a village to co-own the solar park next to it.Think first, then open +
Trust and local organisation come first; shares and a fair price make ownership real. A hierarchical push would undermine the trust the project needs.
Endorsed by ECOSOC in July 2018 as a reference for implementing the SDGs (UN DESA, n.d.; Bouckaert et al., n.d.). Use them as evaluation criteria for the governance arrangement your strategy proposes.
Dozens of international policy frameworks bear on urban and regional development. These six frame most Q3 projects. A metagovernor at every level has to translate them into regional action.
Loorbach (2010) proposes transition management as a governance framework for sustainability: a small arena of frontrunners builds a shared long-term vision, translates it into agendas and experiments, and keeps monitoring and adjusting. It has been influential in Dutch energy policy. Critics ask who gets to be a frontrunner; read it with the democracy section below in mind.
Who steers the Dutch territory?
Dutch planning was long admired for its national spatial strategies and the consensus behind them, a shared planning doctrine (Faludi & van der Valk, 1994; Roodbol-Mekkes et al., 2012). From the late 1980s much of that doctrine was put in question as responsibilities moved to provinces, municipalities and the market. Since 2020 the national government has been taking back direction, and the energy transition is one of the reasons. Open each moment to see who governed, how, with what attitude to government and collective action, and why.
A Nota (in full, Nota over de Ruimtelijke Ordening) is a national spatial planning memorandum: the government’s spatial policy for the whole country, debated and approved by parliament. Each row links to the document itself, or to the nearest available record or English version.
1901Housing ActHousing becomes a public task+
1960First NotaThe nation plans its space+
1966Second NotaConcentrated deconcentration+
1973–1977Third NotaGrowth centres, and the first voice for residents+
1988Fourth NotaCities as engines of the economy+
1991VINEXFourth Nota Extra: new suburbs at the city edge+
2001Fifth NotaA plan that was never adopted+
2004–2006Nota RuimteRoom for development+
2010–2012VROM dissolved, SVIRThe national planner steps back+
2013The participation societyCitizens, take care of yourselves+
2020NOVIIntegration returns+
2022A planning minister againHousing and planning in one hand+
2024OmgevingswetOne law for the living environment+
2025Ontwerp-Nota RuimteThe state takes back direction+
Dates checked against CBS (2025), the Eerste Kamer, Parlement.com, IPLO, the Raad van State and Rijksoverheid. Summaries are short: read the documents themselves before you quote them.
Policies, strategies, investment, zoning
A typology based on the work of Vincent Nadin (see Nadin & Stead, 2008): planning systems work through four modes, on a bed of informal institutions. Real systems mix all four in different proportions, and the mix changes over time. Read the timeline above as a shift in that mix. Open each mode.
Policies+Indicative plans that set criteria and decision rules for other decisions.Open
Policy documents say what matters and how decisions should be weighed, without binding citizens directly. A vision binds the government that adopts it; others follow it through negotiation, funding and general rules.
Dutch example: the national Nota’s on spatial planning since 1960 and the Nationale Omgevingsvisie (2020) set out national interests and how to weigh them (see the timeline above).
Strength: coherence across many decisions. Weakness: it depends on others to act.
Strategies+Selective plans that coordinate the spatial effects of policies and investments.Open
A strategy picks a few shared goals and lines up the sectors and actors behind them. It is usually negotiated, so its force comes from agreement more than from law.
Dutch example: in the Regional Energy Strategies, municipalities, provinces and water boards agree together where wind and solar should go.
Strength: links land use to action. Weakness: agreements can be vague, and weak actors may not be at the table.
Investment+Government shapes space by spending on infrastructure, land and housing.Open
Where public money goes, development follows: a railway station, a dike, a grid connection or a subsidy can do more than any plan.
Dutch example: the VINEX locations of the 1990s combined national housing targets with public money for land and infrastructure (see the 1990s in the timeline above).
Strength: it makes things happen. Weakness: it needs budgets, and favours places that already attract investment.
Zoning+Legally binding plans that say what may be built where.Open
Zoning gives rights and limits to landowners, and citizens can challenge it in court. It is the most legal of the four modes.
Dutch example: under the Omgevingswet, in force since 1 January 2024 (Raad van State, n.d.), each municipality has one environmental plan (omgevingsplan), which gradually takes over the rules of the old land-use plans (bestemmingsplannen).
Strength: legal certainty. Weakness: it can block, but it cannot build.
Which mode dominates in the Netherlands today?Think first, then open +
The Dutch system is the classic example of a comprehensive, integrated tradition, in which national policy, public investment and binding municipal plans worked together (Nadin & Stead, 2008). After 2010 national policy and investment retreated and more was left to municipal zoning and negotiated regional strategies (Zonneveld, 2017). The draft Nota Ruimte (2025) brings national direction back (Nijenhuis, 2025). Ask which mode carries the energy question in your region.
Which mode dominates in your own country?Think first, then open +
Check four things. Is there a national spatial strategy, and does anyone follow it? Are land-use plans legally binding, or is development decided case by case? Who pays for infrastructure and housing, and who decides where it goes? How much is settled in informal deals? Then compare with the Netherlands, and with a classmate from another country.
Is the return of national direction good for spatial justice?
Write down your answer before you open the cards. Then weigh the arguments for a state that provides public goods, which serve both citizens and the economy, against the risks of central power.
Some goods only the state provides+Public goodsOpen
Flood defences, clean air, a stable grid and open landscapes are public goods: one person’s use does not reduce another’s, and no one can easily be excluded. Markets therefore supply too little of them (Samuelson, 1954). Someone has to decide and pay at a scale above the municipality. See Public goods.
Public investment builds the economy+Infrastructure and innovationOpen
Roads, grids, water safety and research raise the productivity of private firms. Aschauer (1989) linked a slowdown in productivity in the United States to falling public infrastructure investment; economists still debate the size of the effect. Mazzucato (2013) shows how states took the early, risky investments behind technologies that markets later profited from. A national strategy that plans the grid and water safety is also an economic strategy.
Redistribution between places+Spatial justiceOpen
Only a level above the municipality can move resources from strong to weak regions and compensate places that carry national burdens. The parliamentary inquiry into gas extraction concluded that the interests of the people of Groningen were long ignored (Parlementaire enquêtecommissie aardgaswinning Groningen, 2023). Repairing that is a national task.
Coordination where places compete+Against a race to the bottomOpen
When municipalities compete for jobs, investors and taxes, each may accept warehouses, data centres or sprawl that none would choose together. Competition between places is built into rescaled state spaces (Brenner, 2004). A national framework can set limits that no single municipality dares to set alone.
Long horizons+Climate, water, energyOpen
Climate adaptation and energy networks need decisions that run for decades and cross municipal and provincial borders. The national programme for the main energy infrastructure plans high-voltage lines and large energy sites from the national level (Ministerie van Economische Zaken en Klimaat, 2024).
Burdens for the periphery+Who pays the price?Open
National interests can override the places that carry the burdens. Groningen is the Dutch lesson: gas revenue served the nation for decades while the damage stayed in one province (Parlementaire enquêtecommissie aardgaswinning Groningen, 2023).
Technocracy and capture+Who defines the national interest?Open
National interests can be defined by experts, officials and powerful sectors with little room for public contest (Papadopoulos, 2007; Swyngedouw, 2005). A strong state is not automatically a democratic one.
Distance+Who knows the place?Open
National rules see regions from far away. Local knowledge, attachment to a landscape and informal arrangements are easily missed, and one rule for the whole country fits some places badly.
Central direction can protect public goods and weak regions from local vetoes and market pressure. It can also override the places that carry the burdens. Judge any national plan, including your own proposal, on four tests:
- Scope: what does the national level decide, and what does it leave open to regions and communities?
- Distribution: who carries the burdens, who gets the benefits, and is there compensation or benefit sharing?
- Contest: can the people affected take part and challenge the decision? See section 08.
- Reach: does national investment go to the regions that need it, or to those that already attract it?
The long road to neoliberal governance
Neoliberalism is a theory of political and economic practice which holds that human well-being is best advanced by freeing individual entrepreneurship within a framework of strong private property rights, free markets and free trade, with the state guaranteeing that framework (Harvey, 2005). In practice it comes in two phases: a destructive roll-back, which dismantles collective institutions, and a creative roll-out, which builds new ones in the market’s image (Peck & Tickell, 2002). The Dutch timeline above shows both. The critique of neoliberal governance makes three claims.
Neoliberal governance decentralises and slims down state functions and shifts responsibilities to markets, quasi-markets and individuals.
HousingHousing associations made legally (1993) and financially (1995) independent of the state (Parlementaire enquêtecommissie Woningcorporaties, 2014).
EnergyRegional grids separated by ownership from production and supply under the Independent Network Management Act, in force from 1 July 2008. The grids stayed in public hands; supply became a market (Dessing et al., 2013).
PlanningThe ministry VROM split up in 2010 and national planning reduced to a minimum in 2012 (Zonneveld, 2017).
Critics argue that when collective provision gives way to markets and self-reliance, those with money, time and networks gain, and social and spatial inequalities grow (Harvey, 2005; Brenner & Theodore, 2002).
WelfareIn 2013 the government announced the gradual change from the classical welfare state to a participation society (Parlement.com, 2013). Taking part takes time, skills and money, which are unevenly distributed.
HousingBy 2022 the government appointed a minister for housing and spatial planning again (Rijksoverheid, n.d.). Our reading: a sign that leaving housing to the market had not delivered enough affordable homes.
EnergyWho can afford solar panels, a heat pump or a share in a cooperative decides who benefits from the transition first.
Public bodies were asked to work like businesses: targets, performance indicators, competition, contracts and rankings. This is the New Public Management (Hood, 1991). Hood and Jackson (1991) used the word consultocracy for a state steered by management consultants; critics fear that consultants and indicators replace public deliberation.
DemocracyGovernance beyond the state can open decisions to new actors and at the same time make them less accountable to citizens (Swyngedouw, 2005).
PlanningWhen success is a score, what cannot be counted, such as attachment to a landscape, drops out of the decision.
Your reportCheck which indicators your region’s policy documents use, and what they leave out.
Defenders of these reforms argued that they made public services more efficient, gave people more choice, brought decisions closer to those affected and freed local initiative from national blueprints. Comparative research finds that neoliberalisation affected planning across North West Europe to different degrees, most radically in England, and that the demand for spatial planning persisted even under neoliberal conditions (Waterhout et al., 2013). Your region can test both sides: who gained from decentralisation, and who lost?
Three Dutch moments. Decide, then open.
2010: the ministry VROM is split up and spatial planning disappears from the name of any ministry.Think first, then open +
Mostly roll-back. On 14 October 2010, as the first Rutte cabinet took office, VROM’s tasks were divided: housing, neighbourhoods and integration went to the Ministry of the Interior, and the rest went to the new Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment (Parlement.com, n.d.-b). Spatial planning became a junior partner of transport and water, and in 2012 national planning was reduced to a minimum, leaving more to provinces and municipalities (Zonneveld, 2017).
Why read it as roll-back: a dedicated national institution for coordinating land use disappeared, with much of its capacity, and markets and lower governments were expected to fill the gap.
The counter-reading: supporters saw decentralisation as bringing decisions closer to the people affected, and merging planning with infrastructure as a way to tie land use to investment.
How the story turned: in 2022 a minister for housing and spatial planning returned (Rijksoverheid, n.d.), and on 2 July 2024 the Schoof cabinet created a Ministry of Housing and Spatial Planning again (Rijksoverheid, 2024). Our reading: roll-back, followed fourteen years later by a partial roll-out of national planning.
2013: citizens are asked to take responsibility for their own lives and surroundings in a participation society.Think first, then open +
A new role is built for citizens and municipalities, with new rules and expectations. Our reading: it can be both, cutting the welfare state while constructing a new kind of citizen.
2024: the regulator replaces first come, first served on the grid with priorities for public needs.Think first, then open +
A public authority writes public values back into a market-like rule (section 06). Some would call it re-regulation; others would ask who now decides what counts as a public need.
Democracy and legitimacy
John Dewey argued that a public comes into being when people are affected by the indirect consequences of actions they did not take part in, and need those consequences to be looked after (Dewey, 1927). A new substation creates such a public overnight. For Dewey, democracy is the continuous, deliberative process through which such publics find each other, discuss and act. We read his model through three ideas.
Collective problem-solving, learning and informed decision-making through open debate.
Many perspectives enrich decisions, foster creativity and improve the result.
Institutionalised fallibilism: accountability and feedback through periodic elections, a free press and the right to change course.
This three-part reading is our synthesis of Dewey (1927).
Political scientists judge the legitimacy of governance arrangements on input and output (Scharpf, 1999), and on throughput, the quality of the process in between (Schmidt, 2013). Networks often promise better output while weakening input: decisions are prepared by experts and officials whom no one elected (Papadopoulos, 2007).
Are those affected able to take part and be represented?
Is the process transparent, inclusive and open to contest?
Does it deliver results that serve the common good?
Three invented claims about a substation. Open after you decide.
“The substation is the cheapest option and will cut congestion for 20,000 households.”Think first, then open +
A claim about results. Strong output legitimacy can still fail on input: the village was never asked.
“All objections were published, answered in writing and discussed in a public meeting before the council voted.”Think first, then open +
A claim about the quality of the process (Schmidt, 2013).
“The residents’ association sat on the regional steering group from the first meeting.”Think first, then open +
A claim about who takes part. Check whether they could change anything once seated.
For participation in practice, read Session 05 and energy democracy.
Governance in your strategy
A spatial strategy without a governance arrangement is a wish. We draw four lessons for planning in an uncertain future from the Dutch Delta Programme: a holistic long-term vision, tailor-made multi-level governance, risk-based adaptive strategies and adequate governance arrangements. We have turned it into ten checks for your report, and added the last one.
Map the governance of your region step by step in the Session 05 workshop, then specify it in your strategy (regional planning and design). If your objective is to democratise decisions, your pathway is D (Pathways).
Where next
References
Working definitions were written for this course. Examples marked as invented were written for this page; answers marked as our reading are open to argument.
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