The Environmental Planning Act : the integration of local knowledge and participation in public policy on the implementation of spatial development projects in The Netherlands

(1)

The Environmental Planning Act

The integration of local knowledge and participation in public policy on the

implementation of spatial development projects in The Netherlands

Author: Sissel Bouwens (10571329) Supervisor: Dr. A.M.C. (Anne) Loeber Second Reader: Dr. D.W. (David) Laws

Date: 29-6-2018

Master Thesis Political Science

(2)

1. Introduction

1.1 Setting the stage

Public policy on spatial development projects in the Netherlands is currently going through a fundamental change. In June 2014, the Dutch Ministry for Infrastructure and Environment submitted the bill for the Environmental Planning Act to the Dutch Parliament. The final Act was published in March 2016 and is supposed to entry into force in 2021 (Rijksoverheid, 2018). The introduction of this new law creates a whole new way of thinking about and looking at public policy on spatial development. The creation of public policy on spatial development in The Netherlands always has been hierarchical and centrally managed. With the introduction of this Environmental Planning Act a shift towards more decentralisation in spatial development can be observed, in which local governmental domains get more space and freedom to make policy decisions about spatial planning without the involvement of the national government (Rijksoverheid, 2018).

The current law on spatial development projects is spread out over numerous different laws. There are separate laws for infrastructure, construction, water management, soil, noise, environment and many more. Due to this scattering of legislation, a lot of issues with agreement on policies, problems with the coordination between different parties and reduced accessibility for different users can be seen. The Environmental Planning Act seeks to “modernise, simplify and harmonise the current different rules on spatial development and tries to integrate these rules into one legal framework” (Rijksoverheid, 2017). Therefore, this act causes the legislative simplification of spatial development. Plans and permits will now be combined as much as possible, which also means that time and costs can be saved. The new Act lays emphasis on the internal relationship with the physical environment and provides instruments to anticipate effectively on dynamic processes in this environment. Spatial projects always took a lot of time before implementation was possible, but this might change now the government is planning on this new integral approach (Rijksoverheid, 2017).

Thus, the Environmental Planning Act causes that the different facts and rules of the different governmental domains will now be bundled together. The national government states that the new Act will therefore make it a lot “easier” to start projects around spatial planning, nature, environment and sustainable projects. The expectation is that local governmental domains will have more freedom to create knowledge and rules to implement policies to their own needs and interests. This way of working is different from how it always has been. Due to the involvement of the local environment in the early stages of the policy making process

(4)

“different local perspectives, local knowledge and creativity will come to the surface quickly”, which can save time in the policy process. Participation is a very important pillar in the new Act and can be described as “the involvement of stakeholders (citizens, companies, civil society organizations and administrative bodies) in the process of decision-making on a project or activity at an early stage” (all quotations Participation Guide Rijksoverheid, own translation, 2018). The government states that participation provides more support and better decisions. This “participation” in the new Act is based on the idea of “customization”, which means that the law does not prescribe how the participation and input of local perspectives and local knowledge should take place. The new Act will cause that participation in the policy processes will be obligatory, but local governmental domains can decide on their own how this participation will take place and how it will be worked out in practice (Participation Guide Rijksoverheid, 2018).

Hence, the enlargement of participation and the input of local knowledge in the new Environmental Planning Act will improve the implementation of spatial planning, environmental and sustainable projects, according to the national government (Rijksoverheid, 2018). However, in 2016 there already was a lot of resistance against this new Act in the House of Representatives, because the majority was afraid that the municipalities were not all ready to deal with the implementation of the new Act. The reason for this agitation was a letter of the Association of Dutch Municipalities (VNG), in which they outlined a series of bottlenecks for their municipalities. They claimed they have to prepare for a changing system, while a lot of the new Act is still uncertain and unclear. The new way of thinking and acting that the new Act brings, is completely different from what local governmental domains have been used to before. They now have to meet the conditions of participation and the involvement of local stakeholders in the policy making process but they have to figure out their selves how they should do this. The Association of Dutch Municipalities argued that “the new Act still is a puzzle, with a lot of missing pieces” (Binnenlands Bestuur, 2016).

Nevertheless, the national government has high hopes for the new Act to be an improvement for the implementation of public policy on spatial development projects in The Netherlands. The Dutch government argues that this enlargement of local input will make it less complicated to implement and start projects around spatial planning, environmental and sustainable projects. Due to the focus on more bottom-up and stakeholder input it will be easier to conduct certain projects or policies and will also save time in the process. However, how this bottom-up input in the form of local knowledge and participation works and is regulated in practice still stays extremely vague. Besides, the description of the new law seems to have a lot

(5)

of obscurities. It also might be possible that policy practice will just get more complicated, due to the enlargement of actors involved or because the local governmental domains don’t know what to do with the freedom they will get. The national government presented this new law and the benefits it may bring, but it still seems quite unclear how the incorporation of local knowledge and participation and the enormous shift in working of the different local governmental domains will be translated to practice or if this translation is even possible at all.

Therefore, it’s important to look more precisely and in detail at the new Environmental Planning Act. On the one hand there is a desire on the part of the national government to make spatial planning “easier” and more “participative” with the new Environmental Planning Act, but on the other hand it seems that this wish is still insufficiently operationalized. The aim of this thesis is to understand the elaboration of the new Act and therefore find out what the integration of local knowledge and participation in public policy means for the implementation of spatial development projects from both a top-down and bottom-up perspective, to see to which extent these perspectives are compatible. So in order to gain insight into the elaboration of this wish of the national government to make spatial planning “easier” and more “participative”, this thesis will look on the one hand how the new Act is understood at the national level and on the other hand how the Act is explained and interpreted at the local level. Moreover, this thesis will look at different cases in which this elaboration of the new Act, with the integration of local knowledge and participation, is already practically expressed. This enables the comparison between the practices at the local level and the perspective of the national government. An analytical framework will be used to compare the practices at the local level with the perspective of the national government on the integration of local knowledge and participation. This thesis uses the participation perspective of Fung (2006) and the local knowledge perspective of Corburn (2002; 2007) to provide the empirical data in this thesis with a theoretical interpretation.

1.2 Main and sub-questions

This thesis strives to get a better understanding of the elaboration of the new Act and to find out if the integration of local knowledge and participation indeed make spatial planning “easier”, as the national government argues. In order to gain insight into the elaboration of the new Act and integration of local knowledge and participation in spatial development projects, this thesis will on the one hand look at how this integration is understood at the national level and on the other hand how it gets explained and interpreted at the level of the local governmental domains. By looking at cases of practice, the perspective of the national

(6)

government on what the integration of local knowledge and participation means for spatial planning can be compared with how it’s working out in practice and the perspective of the local level. Thus, this thesis looks at what the integration of local knowledge and participation means for the implementation of spatial development projects, from both the perspective of the national government and the perspective of the local governmental domains. Therefore, the main-question in this thesis reads:

“What does the integration of local knowledge and participation in public policy mean for the implementation of spatial development projects in the Netherlands from both a top-down and a bottom-up perspective, and to which extent are these perspectives compatible with each other?”

In order to answer this main question, the following sub-questions will be discussed:

1. “How can the integration of local knowledge and participation in public policy on spatial development projects be understood by the perspective of the national government?”

2. “How do local governmental domains explain the integration of local knowledge and participation in public policy on spatial development projects?”

3. “To which extent is the perspective of the national government, on the integration of local knowledge and participation in public policy on spatial development projects, compatible with practice at the local level?”

To answer the first sub-question, this thesis will focus on how the translation of the new Environmental Planning Act, with the integration of local knowledge and participation, can be understood according to the perspective of the national government and therefore from the perspective of the “writer” of the new Act. The national government still keeps quite vague and undetailed about how these concepts can be integrated. This thesis wants to find how the national government understands this integration of participation and the input of local knowledge and how they see this translated to practice. Therefore, interviews with civil servants at the national level will be conducted to see how the translation of the new Act, with the integration of local knowledge and participation, can be understood from the perspective of the national government.

(7)

To answer the second sub-question, this thesis will look at how the translation of the new Environmental Planning Act, with the integration of local knowledge and participation, gets explained and interpreted by the local governmental domains. There will be a focus on how different local governmental domains intend to implement the new Act and thereby give meaning to the integration of local knowledge and participation. The objective is to find out how the local governmental domains explain and interpret the implementation of the new Act and how they make local knowledge and participation work in practice. This thesis will therefore look at the Pilot Program “Working with the Environmental Planning Act”, in which different local governmental domains have participated and therefore can already share some of their experience with translating the Act and integrating participation and local knowledge in their public policies. Besides, the integration of local knowledge and participation will be analysed by looking at the cases of the municipalities Alphen aan de Rijn and Uden and the province Flevoland. These three cases of local governmental domains are selected because they already practiced with the new Act and the integration of local knowledge and participation. Therefore, these make it possible to answer the third sub-question and compare the integration of local knowledge and participation within the cases with how the national government understands this integration. It enables to see if what the national government expects to happen when integrating local knowledge and participation in public policy on spatial development projects is compatible with what is happening in practice.

In the end, it will be possible to draw some conclusions in terms of Fung (2006) and Corburn (2002; 2007) form these questions on what this integration of local knowledge and participation means for the implementation of spatial development projects in the Netherlands from both a top-down and a bottom-up perspective, and to which extent these perspectives are compatible with each other. The conclusions of this thesis can thus help in anticipating on the implementation of the new Environmental Planning Act and the possible bottlenecks it may bring. With these conclusions this thesis strives to give a better understanding of the shift towards the integration of local knowledge and participation in public policy practice and hopes to contribute to the scientific debate about what the integration of participation and local knowledge means for the implementation of spatial development projects.

1.3 Thesis structure

Before discussing the theoretical basis of this thesis, the research methods which underlie this thesis will be discussed. Hereafter, a theoretical preface about the changing context will be given to understand where the idea behind the new Environmental Planning Act is coming from

(8)

and which changes it may bring to public policy on spatial development projects. Next, the main concepts within this thesis, “participation” and “local knowledge”, will be discussed and operationalized. The participation perspective of Fung (2006) and the local knowledge perspective of Corburn (2002; 2007) will form the analytical framework from which the empirics can be provided with theoretical interpretation. This analytical framework will be used to look at the elaboration of the new Act and to analyse the understanding of the integration of local knowledge and participation at the national level and the explanation of this integration at the local level. This makes it possible to say something about the differences between these two perspectives in terms of Fung and Corburn. To determine how the integration of local knowledge and participation is understood by the national government, policy documents about the new Act will be observed and interviews with civil servants on the national level will be conducted. After that, this thesis will investigate how the local governmental domains explain and interpret the translation of the new Act and the integration of local knowledge and participation by observing the Pilot Program “Working with the Environmental Planning Act”. Hereafter, the cases of Alphen aan de Rijn, Uden and Flevoland will illustrate the practical elaboration of the new Act. This makes it possible to compare practice with the perspective of the national government and come up with the differences between them. Finally, this thesis will end with conclusions on what the integration of local knowledge and participation means for the implementation of spatial development projects from both the perspective of the national government and the local level, and to which extent these perspectives are compatible with each other.

2. Methods

This thesis will use a qualitative research approach to answer the main and sub-questions. Methods of interviewing and case study will be used within this qualitative approach. To answer the first sub-question, policy documents about the new Act will be discussed. Due to the fact that the new Act is still very vague and is prone to a lot of uncertainties, interviews with civil servants on the level of the national government will be performed. The three civil servants being interviewed are all working on the implementation of the adjustments this new law requires. These civil servants work at the Ministry of Home Affairs and Kingdom Relations, Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Board and the Dutch Association of Municipalities. The conducted interviews are qualitative, semi-structured, in-depth interviews that were carried out between May 8th and May 18th. These interviews can hopefully shine some light on the

(9)

uncertainties the Act still has, such as how the integration of participation and local knowledge in the Act is understood by the national government and what this means for policy practice.

To answer the second and third sub-question, the published interviews of the Pilot Program “Working with the Environmental Planning Act” are observed to find out how the local domains are getting along with the implementation of the new Act. This Pilot Program “Working with the Environmental Planning Act” was performed between 2017 and 2018. The program consisted of twelve pilots that in the past year intensively worked on creating an environmental vision for the Environmental Planning Act. Hereafter, the integration of local knowledge and participation will be analysed by looking at three cases of local governmental domains that already expressed the Environmental Planning Act in practice. The local governmental domains this thesis uses for its case studies are: the municipality of Alphen aan de Rijn, the municipality of Uden and the province Flevoland. These three local governmental domains are selected because they already started working with the Environmental Planning Act by doing pilots or experiments. The local governmental domains that are selected as cases all differ in size for the purpose of generalization. The municipality of Alphen aan de Rijn can be seen as a middle-sized municipality and has about 110.00 residents. Uden can be seen as a smaller sized municipality that has about 40.000 residents. The province Flevoland exists of six municipalities with together about 400.000 residents. Using the interviews from the Pilot Program and the cases studies makes it therefore possible to already perceive some practical interpretations at the local level and in the end compare those with the perspective of the national government.

The use of qualitative methods in this thesis, conducting and analysing interviews, can cause a possibility of bias in its approach. There is a possibility that I am influenced in the process of interviewing and analysing, especially with regards to my own thoughts about the new Act. This possibly can result into an interview-bias because the respondents get influenced. This can result in a mismatch between the assumptions and the answers. Therefore, the answers to the main and sub-questions can be influenced through these assumptions. Moreover, the interviews that this thesis analyses are almost all from people that are working for the government. It’s a possibility they might be biased about the new Act too and therefore might not be critical. The interviews that are used in the second part of the analysis all come from governmental rapports and thus a certain bias might also have to be taken into account, because it’s a possibility that only certain information was used when drawing their conclusions.

(10)

3. Theoretical framework

3.1 Changing context of public policy practice

To understand where the idea behind the new Environmental Planning Act is coming from and the changes it may bring to public policy on the implementation of spatial development projects, it’s important to understand the practice of public policy and its changing context. Activities of public policy and policy practitioners have already been an attracted case of study for a long time. How to make public policy work and the uncertainties that the public domain brings still remains a relevant subject of study till this very day (Hajer & Laws, 2008). Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) focused on implementation by looking at public policy as an initial setting of the proposed goals, the commitment to funds and the securing of an agreement. In their case of study, they could not escape the constant change of context and the thereby coming need to adapt to new situations over time. It seems that this constant change of context caused the problem that “joint action” between different stakeholders became very complex (Pressman & Wildavsky, 1973). They tended to theorize implementation as a context-rich domain in which action implies the constant need of adaptation and learning. Pressman and Wildavsky thereby treat implementation and evaluation as inseparable, where implementation provides the experience that needs evaluation and evaluation provides the experience to make sense of what is happening in the context. In the public policy domain “baseline goals are often re-sculpted at the very scene of implementation”. The implementer becomes a new source of information and thereby implementation is not an unquestioning and instrumental process but rather an exploratory concept (Pressman & Wildavsky, 1973: 256).

Lipsky (1980) argued that the decisions and routines of policy practitioners, with the way they cope with uncertainties, complexity and work pressures, in the end has effect on the public policies they carry out. Public policy cannot be understood as made in legislatures or top-down arrangements because it’s made in daily encounters of street-level workers and “the crowded bureaucratic offices” (Lipsky, 1980). Lipsky tried to figure out why policy practitioners often perform contrary to their proposed goals. In doing so, he looked at the way the rules are experienced by the people within the organisation and to what pressure they are submitted to (Lipsky, 1980). Lipsky stated that in policy practice, one of the primary activities of “street-level bureaucrats” is to manage their relationship with organizational hierarchy. In his study it became clear that organizations were dependent on the judgements and initiatives of the front-line practitioners in the policy making field and that they had to deal with the demands of policy in combination with limited resources and complex cases that characterize

(11)

their work. In these type of situations, relationships were dynamic and the authority of hierarchy was not complete. However, the boundaries within which authority was negotiated were stable and thus the implementation of policy took place in the stability of public bureaucracy (Lipsky, 1980; Hajer & Laws, 2008).

These stable relationships within public policy practice cannot longer be assumed. The scope of policy practice has changed and has led to a new way of looking at the concept of policy practice (Hajer & Laws, 2008). The character of policy making changed into an inter-organizational and cross-boundary activity. Policy making now provokes a “role of actors from outside the formal state apparatus in policy work” and the “open and fluid patterns of association that often characterize their participation is a persistent concern in the study of public policy today” (Heclo, 1978; Hajer & Laws, 2008: 412). To describe the linkages that increasingly tie different participants together in policy communities the term “network” has come to the surface (Rhodes, 1997). It has become clear that not one single actor, in public or private systems, holds all the knowledge, information, potential, and instruments that are needed to dominate the governing model. This change in context to the use of different horizontal and vertical linkages that tie participants together in policy communities is best captured by the term “network governance” (Rhodes, 1997). In this context, governance can be interpreted as a dynamic and complex process of policy practice. Society is not managed by one dominant form of knowledge but intelligence and knowledge are distributed among multiple units (Marin & Mayntz, 1991).

The developments and shift towards a form of network governance and the emergence of a deliberative democracy practices are widely narrated and discussed by many scholars (Rodes, 2007; Hajer, 2003; Crozier, 2007; Laws & Hajer, 2008). Laws and Hajer (2008) make it clear that there is now a fluidity of organizational relationships, with the importance of repeated interaction between different and continuously changing group of actors. Thereby it’s also important that within these relationships between different actors, there is inherent process of learning and a need to negotiate knowledge in the changing or complex situations and contexts of policy making. There now needs to be a significance of the interactions that occur around policy action in the domain of practice. As Laws and Hajer state it, the concept of policy practice “highlights the negotiated character of public policy and does so in a way that related individual action to institutional contexts” (Laws & Hajer, 2008: 421). There must sought for a better understanding of how and where we should locate the dynamic and flexible process of a deliberate view to public policy problems. Reconceiving the policy field, with its permanent organizations, in looking at networks of practice between these organizations may help to

(12)

understand policy practice as a place for public intelligence. This way it might be possible to find solutions for complex policy problems that lie beyond the scope of isolated organizations and institutions (Laws & Hajer, 2008; Rhodes, 2007; Hajer, 2003).

Because we see a shift in policy practice towards a form of network governance, the relationship between knowledge and policy practice has become more complex. Social scientists are more and more meaningfully asking whether social science is the solution to all and most fundamental issues in the policy problem field (Rein, 1976). More and more we see the existence of the belief that scientific knowledge cannot help us any longer in making better policy decisions. Because of this, science has become more contested ever since and a therefore less stable pillar for policy in the field of complex problems (Law & Hajer, 2008). The new Environmental Planning Act has been made in the context of this changing policy practice, in which we see that top-down knowledge is often contested by different actors in the field. Especially actors who are closely and/or locally involved in the policy making process can get their own knowledge about the policy problem. The new Environmental Planning Act tries to respond to this changing context whereby top down knowledge alone is not always working anymore (Hajer, 2003). The law on spatial development as it currently stands, still focuses more on a top-down approach as the right way to solve complex problems. However, this way of policy making causes resistance and spatial development projects therefore cost more time before implementation was possible. But this might change now by integrating local knowledge and participation in public policy. The national government hopes that the new Act improves the implementation of spatial development projects. It emphasises on the internal relationship with the physical environment and provides instruments to anticipate effectively on dynamic processes in the environment (Rijksoverheid, 2017).

The tendency towards the use of other types of knowledge in public policy, instead of only using centralised top-down information, is something we see more often in the recent years. Especially the use of “local knowledge” (also called “community knowledge”), which also gets used in the Environmental Planning Act, is increasing (Adams, 2004: 29). This shift towards other forms of usable knowledge can be seen as caused by the fragmentation of modern society. This changing context of policy making, as mentioned before, has led to the fact that we rethink centralised expertise as the dominant form of knowledge in public policy today (Adams, 2004: 41). Furthermore, Hajer (2003) argues that the context of policy making has changed over the recent years. It has become clear that national governments nowadays are no longer able to find solutions for pressing problems on their own. It becomes clear that institutional arrangements seem to lack the power to deliver the required policy results their

(13)

selves, which is why they take part in “networks of governance in which power is dispersed” (Hajer, 2003). Besides, the weakening of the state goes hand in hand with the emergence of new citizen actors and new forms of civil mobilization. The policy field is changing into a network governance field, which means that more actors get involved in the implementation of a social policy. In addition, non-state actors also play a more important role in the policy making field nowadays. Hence, the context of policy making has shifted towards a form of “network governance”, in which state and non-state actors increasingly work together to find solutions for problems modern society is facing. It’s not only the national government alone anymore, who takes policy action within societies (Rhodes, 2007; Hajer, 2003: 175).

Governments, if ever, no longer have the alone power to decide on public policies. They are becoming more dependent on the involvement of different public and private non-state actors (Crozier, 2007: 3). The solutions for pressing policy problems nowadays finds it way through interaction between these actors, who work together through “networks”. This causes that the context of policy making is transformed to more dynamic and complex processes (Crozier, 2007: 3-4). Different domains of governments and more non-state actors have to work together in the process of policy making and it seems that this is not always working that well. Governments agree on certain policies, to discover later that it’s sometimes quite hard to implement it successfully. This can lead to the fact that policies sometimes are not implemented in the way they were meant to be on paper, or not get implemented at all (Hajer, 2009: 29-32). Public policy on spatial projects takes a lot of time before implementation is possible. This because of the functional differentiation of the different governmental domains and the difference in knowledge and rules between them. Now that the policy making field changed in a more network governance field, it seems even harder to implement spatial development projects due to increasing amount of also non-state actors involved. This all results in the fact that social research cannot always be found as the only right knowledge within the situation of the problem and that thus the knowledge about the implementation of a public policy can be contested by different actors. Especially actors who are closely involved in the policy making process can get their own interpretation of what the facts are. Hence, we can see a shift in policy making whereby top down knowledge alone is not always working anymore (Hajer, 2003).

Fischer (2000) also argues that it has become more difficult to have a democracy in our changing and complex society and even calls this one of the most challenging political issues of our time. He states that knowledge must not be the exclusive province of experts and that we also need to accept a subjective element in knowledge for public policy (Fischer, 2000: 252). Rather than only looking at “value neutrality” and objective knowledge creation, experts must

(14)

actively employ their own subjectivity in knowledge creation to understand the views of others, such as: citizens, politicians, decision-makers and more. This will result in a more “useful and realistic description of the actual relationship between the citizen and expert” (Fischer, 2000: 253; Fischer & Forester, 1993). This form of interpretive knowledge creation requires experts to involve in the modes of learning of everyday life, which can be called local knowledge of the ordinary citizens. This way knowledge can be seen as something more than a set of data (Fischer, 2000: 252).

Local knowledge can be seen as the knowledge of the participants in the everyday world and it is the primary means of giving meaning to complex social phenomena. Fischer states that by bringing professional knowledge and lived experience together, citizens and experts could form a so called “interpretive community” (Fischer, 2000: 252-253). By having a mutual discourse, the community seeks a persuasive understanding of the issues under investigation. We can thereby see a transformation to individual beliefs, whereby social values are included. In this process, the inquirer is a part of the community and can be seen more as an agent in the social context, rather than an isolated passive observer. Furthermore, the means and ends in this process are inseparably linked. Those who tend to participate in this process of local knowledge creation, need to accept the practical and moral responsibilities for their decisions and consequences (Fischer, 2000: 253). According to Fischer, we’re working towards the fact that these types of inquiries are embedded in actual organizational and policy making processes. This would mean an institutionalization of local knowledge and the development of arenas in which this knowledge can be debated and interpreted in relation to the relevant policy problem (Fischer, 2000: 253). The new Environmental Planning Act can be seen as an example of such an embedding and institutionalization of local knowledge in the public policy making process.

3.2 Analytical Framework

The new Environmental Planning Act is planning to integrate local knowledge and participation in the process of policy making and argues that this will make it “easier” to implement spatial development projects and also will “save time” in the policy process (Rijksoverheid, 2018). By looking at the elaboration of integrating local knowledge and participation from both a top-down and a bottom-up perspective, I hope to see to which extent both these perspectives are compatible with each other. “Participation” by Fung (2006) and “local knowledge” by Corburn (2002; 2007) will form an analytical framework, which will provide the empirical material in this thesis with theoretical interpretation. The conceptual ideas about local knowledge and participation form a basis and a frame of reference to look at the translation of the new Act.

(15)

The perspectives of the national government and the local authorities will be illustrated in more detail by the use of policy documents and interviews. The theoretical aspects of local knowledge and participation will then be linked to these empirical considerations and findings. By looking at these empirical considerations and findings with this analytic framework of Fung and Corburn, it will be possible to analyse what the national government argues this integration of local knowledge and participation will mean for the implementation of spatial development projects and what this integration means in practice at the local level. In the end, some conclusions to which extent these perspectives are compatible with each other can be drawn.

3.2.1 Local Knowledge

It seems that defining the concept of local knowledge is not that simple and that it at best can be understood in how practice differs from the way professionals operate (Adams, 2004: 38). Local knowledge is often more place-based knowledge, with a conjuncture between the temporal and spatial elements of knowledge generation. This type of knowledge has not always been too well understood in public policy, but it seems that this emergence of temporal and spatial ideas is now becoming central to policy work (Adams, 2004: 38). In the policy science literature, local knowledge gets describes as “knowledge that does not owe its origin, testing, degree of verification, truth, status, or currency to distinctive professional techniques but rather to common sense, casual empiricism, or thoughtful speculation and analysis” (Lindblom and Cohen 1979:12). Local knowledge thereby includes relevant information on local contexts or settings. Geertz (1983) defines local knowledge as “practical, collective and strongly rooted in a particular place that forms an organized body of thought based on immediacy of experience” (1983: 167). Understanding the nature of local knowledge has implications for the way we organise, plan, fund, and implement public policies. With the use of local knowledge, “the key unit of organisation for the public sector should move from programs to relatively small-scale places for the planning and delivery of policy services” (Adams, 2004: 39). This suggests that for example local managers might become critical roles in the future. There still must be figured out what skill set exactly is required for co-production of community knowledge. It means that we need to rethink about local institutions and their capability to make them responsible for local general-purpose knowledge (Adams, 2004: 39).

As already mentioned, when analysing the integration of local knowledge in this thesis I will use the perspective of Corburn (2007). Corburn states that because of the fact that the public and other actors have a greater demand in public in the policy-making processes, policy makers need to find new ways of understanding and incorporating expertise with the contextual

(16)

intelligence that people within the community have. This process leads to taking into account “community knowledge”, to find new ways of combining the expertise of professionals and scientists, with the contextual knowledge, or “local knowledge”, that community residents have (Corburn, 2007: 150). Corburn pleats for a co-production model for policy making, which is a science policy frame that questions institutionalized ideas of expertise (Corburn, 2007: 152; Jasanoff, 2004). This frame of co-production states that there is an authoritative knowledge frame in society, which gets stabilized and institutionalized over time so it becomes a given truth. This co-production model suggests that science is “not contaminated by society but rather embed and is thereby embedded in social practices, identities, norms, conventions, discourses, instruments, and institutions – in short, in all the building blocks of what we term the social” (Jasanoff, 2004: 3). Co-production aims to bring the “social” back into science policy making. Thereby it also tries to explore how knowledge is applied and institutionalized over time (Corburn, 2007: 152). In practice, this co-production emphasizes the contingency of all sorts of expertise and claims that neither experts, nor community knowledge can put rest to uncertain policy problems alone. There must come a process in which the knowledge and expertise of local citizens gets integrated, which are now often ignored by the professionals.

Local domains can thus be responsible for the input of bottom-up local knowledge. Furthermore, knowledge can also be held by members of a certain community which can be geographically located and contextual to specific groups (Corburn, 2007: 153). This means that a “knowledge community” can for example be: a neighbourhood, group with a shared culture, language and many more. Whereas, professional expert knowledge is held by members of a profession such as a governmental agency. Local knowledge is often acquired through real life experience and is often mediated through culture or traditions. Practitioners of local knowledge rely on evidence from time-honoured traditions and see this type of knowledge as easily accessible and widely shared (Corburn, 2007: 153). Because credibility is important to knowledge claims, it’s a bit harder to focus on instrument credibility within local knowledge. Local knowledge is not dependent on instruments but gets its credibility from actual sights and the tactile and emotional experiences that come up in everyday life. This type of knowledge is also different in how it gets tested and legitimized. It is generally tested in public narratives, public forums, and community stories (Corburn, 2007; Corburn, 2002).

Corburn (2002) states that when professionals don’t acknowledge the value of local knowledge, their work will miss out on important information and will be less efficient and democratic (Corburn, 2002: 272). Yet, local knowledge is not something that these professionals are able to acquire their selves if they want to fuse it with their professional work.

(17)

Local knowledge cannot be seen as a set of methods that anyone can acquire and learn with enough practice. It can be more seen as a process instead of a particular information (Corburn, 2002: 272). For professionals to work with local knowledge there must not only be an understanding of how local knowledge in a particular place or community works and its gathered, but to export this knowledge they must go through the process of local knowledge production. Professionals cannot gain access to this type of knowledge without going through the whole process. Local or community knowledge can be the new or missing information or insight that professionals are missing and which they cannot achieve alone. Fusing local knowledge with the work of professionals can also help to build partnerships that can be essential for gathering important information and making democratic decisions (Corburn, 2002: 273). These partnerships can improve the legitimacy of policy decisions and also the credibility of the decision-makers, especially in the eyes of local citizens who in the past are often ignored by professionals (Israel et al, 1998; Wynne, 1996). In the end, successful policy making critically hinges on the ability of societal institutions and actors to create trust and credibility. Professionals should therefore recognize the importance of local knowledge in this process (Corburn, 2002: 273).

3.2.2 Participation

“Participation is one of the most important pillars of the Environmental Planning Act” and it will cause “more support and better decision-making”, according to the national government. The new Environmental Planning Act is planning to integrate participation in the process of policy making. I hope to determine if this integration of participation indeed will lead to the fact that it becomes “easier and more efficient” to implement spatial development projects (Rijksoverheid, 2018). In defining citizen participation, the most cited work is the work of Arnstein (1969). She argues that citizen participation is a “categorical term for citizen power” (Arnstein, 1969: 216). This participation causes the redistribution of power that enables citizens to be included in deliberative and decision-making processes of policy practice in the future. It can be seen as a strategy in which citizens join in determining goals, policies, and information for policies. Citizen participation can be seen as the means by which citizens can influence social reforms so they can benefit from our affluent society. Besides, Arnstein describes that there is an important difference in going through a process of participation and the power to really affect the outcome of a policy process. If participation isn’t carried out properly and there is no redistribution of power, it can be a powerless and frustrating process for citizens. In a lot

(18)

of citizen participation cases there is a process in which all the sides in the policy process were considered but in which the status quo maintains it power (Arnstein, 1969).

Arnstein argues that there are eight levels of participation which can be seen in a ladder pattern where each rung contributes more to the power of citizens in the final product of policy. The first two steps on the ladder, manipulation and therapy, can be seen as types of “non-participation” and are used to substitute for participation. The objective of these is not to make people participate in the creation of a policy but to educate and convince the participants. The third and fourth step on the ladder, informing and consultation, allows participants to listen and to have a voice in the program. If this is done right they can indeed be heard, but in this rung they still lack the power to ensure that their views will be taken into account. In this phase there is no securement that their voices definitely will change anything in the process and thereby affect the status quo. The fifth step on the ladder is placation, which argues that citizens are allowed to advise in the process. However, the power holders are still the one to decide. After this step on the ladder there are levels of citizen participation with an increased ability to influence the decision-making process. The sixth rung is a partnership that enables citizens to negotiate with the decision-makers in the process. The highest rungs are: delegated power and citizen control. At this level of participation, citizens have a majority of decision-making power or are completely in charge (Arnstein, 1969: 217). Arnstein additionally mentions that “in the real world” there might be many more rungs with a less sharp distinction between them and this ladder is a simplification which indicates that citizen participation has different gradations.

Considering Arnstein came up with her ladder of participation almost fifty years ago, this ladder might not be the most accurate description of participation in contemporary public policy processes anymore. This ladder-based model suggests the existence of cut-off borders between dichotomised positions. Because of the fact that a participatory process is a dynamic and multi-layered process, it is difficult to capture it with the ladder-based model. The grade of power in participation can change over time, but several components within one process can also yield differences (Carpentier, 2016). That’s why I chose to analyse the integration of participation in this thesis by using the “Democracy Cube” from Fung (2006). Fung argues that as contemporary policy practice nowadays faces the challenges of complex governance, public participation can be a complement to political representation or expertise. The principal reason for enhancing citizen participation in contemporary governance is that the decision-makers may lack the knowledge, competence, resources, or other tools to make efficient policies (Fung, 2006: 67). Fung has developed a framework to understand institutional possibilities “regarding the appropriate participation in governance” (Fung, 2006: 66). Contrary to Arnstein, Fung

(19)

doesn’t look at the grade of power of participation, but more to the way it’s been carried out. He states that the forms in which participation takes place vary on the context and problem in the process. This difference in form of participation has three dimensions: the scope of participation, the way of communicating and making decisions and the extent of authority. These three dimensions of participant selection, the mode of communication and the extent of influence can be seen as a three-dimensional space, which Fung calls the “Democracy Cube”.

Figure 1: The ‘’Democracy Cube’’ by Fung (2006).

The first important dimension of participation is participant selection and the question who participates. Some participatory processes are open to everyone who wishes to do so where others might only be open to specific types of stakeholders or elite groups. There are five selection mechanisms for citizen participation. The majority of public participatory mechanisms, use the least restrictive method of selection. This means that participation processes are “open to all who wish to attend” (Fung, 2006: 67). In these cases, you often see that there always is a group of individuals who tend to participate more than others, which are in most cases wealthier and better educated citizens. To address this problem there are two useful participant selection methods. Participatory processes who are open to all need to select participants from groups that are less likely to engage in such processes. Another option can be a random selection from the population, which is the best guarantee for representativeness in the process (Fung, 2006: 67-68). A fourth method is the engagement of lay stakeholders in

(20)

public decisions or discussions. “Lay stakeholders” are citizens who have a deeper interest in some public problems, which means they are thus more likely willing to invest in participating. The fifth mechanism brings together “professional stakeholders”, who are paid representatives of organized interests and sometimes public officials. Fung calls these five mechanisms “mini-publics”, that intentionally gather citizens to participate in public matters. These devices differ from the two familiar mechanism of selecting individuals within the state, namely “professional politicians” and “experts”. They also contrast with the public as a whole, the “diffuse public sphere”. These eight mechanisms together can be seen from most exclusive to most included in this dimension (Fung, 2006: 68).

The second dimension looks at the way decisions have been made and the way information has been exchanged. There are six main modes of communication in participation processes. The majority of those who attend participatory programs do not come up with their own views at all but they participate as “spectators” and only listen to the information about policies or projects. Also, a lot of these participation processes offer participants the opportunity to “express their preferences”. Other programs are organised in ways that allow participants to develop their preferences and perspectives. Often, these first three modes of communication do not cause the translation of views or preferences into a collective decision (Fung, 2006: 68). In the fourth mode, “aggregation and bargaining”, participations know what they want and their preferences often get translated to decisions. Also “deliberation and negotiation” is a mode which leads to decision making. There is a process of interaction and exchange of preferences, whereby participants go in deliberation toward an agreement with on another based on their arguments. This mode of participation has been elaborated as the deliberative ideal of common democracy (Fung, 2006; Cohen 1989; Gutmann & Thompson, 1996). But still, most public policies are determined through the communication mode of “technical expertise” of officials, who are trained to solve policy problems. This mode of communication in participation does often not involve citizens. These six mechanisms together can be seen from least intensive to most intensive where intensity indicates the level of knowledge, commitment and investment required of the participant (Fung, 2006: 69).

The third dimension describes the linkage between the decision and policy, so in other words what the impact of the public participation process is (Fung, 2006: 66). Participants can only have “personal benefits”, as there is no expectation of influencing the policy but it’s for their own gain. Participatory mechanism can also influence the state by altering on mobilizing a public opinion, which means the participatory process has a “communicative influence” on members of the public or officials. Providing advice and consultation is a third mechanism

(21)

through which participation exerts influence on public authority. In this mode there is room for the input from participants in the decision-making process. Some participation mechanisms exercise direct power which is less common in contemporary policy practice. Citizens then join in a “co-governing partnership” in which they join officials to develop public policies and plans. An even higher level is when participants exercise “direct authority” over public decisions. These modes of authority can be summed up from least authority to most authority in this dimension (Fung, 2006: 69).

Fung states that when these dimensions are carried out properly, participation can address wicked problems in representative institutions. But for receiving a benefit from it, it requires an analytic approach that sets right what participation should look like and what it should do to work. He states that participation thereby serves three important values, which are: legitimacy, justice and effective public policies. To achieve this, participation should be more prominent in contemporary policy practices and governance. However, finding appropriate ways of carrying out participation “demands forward-looking empirical sensitivity and theoretical imagination” (Fung, 2006: 74).

4. Perspective of the National Government

In this chapter, the first sub-question of this thesis will be answered. This first sub-question was: “How can the integration of local knowledge and participation in public policy on spatial

development projects be understood by the perspective of the national government?”. This

thesis will first examine what the perspective of the national government on the translation of Environmental Planning Act is by looking at the various policy documents about the new Act. Furthermore, interviews with civil servants from the national government will be used to analyse how the integration of local knowledge and participation in public policy can be understood and what this integration means for spatial development projects from the perspective of the national level in terms of Corburn (2002; 2007) and Fung (2006).

4.1 Elaboration Environmental Planning Act

Box 1 gives an overview of the key points that the new Environmental Planning Act consists of. Environmental law currently consists of dozens of laws and hundreds of regulations for spatial planning, living, infrastructure, nature, environment, and water. All these departments have their own working methods, starting points, and requirements. Therefore, the current legislation has become too complicated for people to work with and causes delays on the

(22)

implementation of spatial development projects. With the new Environmental Planning Act, the national government seeks to simplify environmental law by combining the different laws (Rijksoverheid, 2018).

Box 1: Overview new Environmental Planning Act (all quotations website national government, my translation, 2018).

The national government argues that the new Act will make it a lot “easier, more efficient and better” to starts spatial projects. The goal of the national government is to coordinate the

Box 1: Overview Environmental Planning Act

The New Environmental Planning Act makes environmental law easier and simply better. The Act compiles the rules for spatial development projects, which makes it easier to start spatial projects such as for example housing on former business parks or the construction of wind farms. The Act bundles 26 existing laws for, among other things, construction, water, environment, spatial planning and nature. The governments already have to start with the preparations to get the act working in 2021.

Key points:

§ It must be easier, more efficient, faster and better

§ Better coordination of the spatial development projects in a specific environment § Encouraging sustainable projects

§ Giving municipalities, provinces and water boards more space, they can adapt their environmental policy to their own needs and objectives

§ Therefore, more space for differences between local governmental domains, customization in each environment

The motto of the Environmental Planning Act is ‘’space for development, guarantees for quality. The Act stands for a good balance between the use and protection of the physical environment.

Decentralization is an important principle of the new Act. This means that tasks and authorities are in principle with the municipalities and water boards. They can make rules that are tailored to the local situation and the protection that is needed there. Only if it’s more efficient, the national government will lay down rules.

Participation is an important pillar of the new Act. The Act states that citizens, companies and civil society organizations must be able to participate in the policy and decision-making processes. By talking to each other at an early stage, different perspectives, local knowledge and creativity come quickly on the table. Participation increases the quality of policy and decisions, contributes to the support of citizens and prevents unnecessary delays and difficulties due to objection and appeal procedures.

(23)

different plans for spatial planning, the environment and nature better, to encourage more sustainable projects (such as windmill farms) and that local governmental domains such as municipalities, provinces and water boards will have more sovereignty and freedom. The new Act also offers more room for private ideas, from for example companies and organization, because of the more general rules that apply now instead of detailed and complicated permits. The goal has to be the main priority now, instead of the means to get there. This requires a different attitude in assessing plans, in which the focus needs to be more on “yes if” instead of “no unless” (Rijksoverheid, 2018).

Arjan Nijenhuis is change manager of the national government for the implementation of the Environmental Planning Act. He made it clear that the national government sees the new Environmental Planning Act, with its new way of integral thinking, as an opportunity to improve the quality of the decisions around spatial planning. It seems that the implementation of only top-down initiatives nowadays evokes many resistances in the local environment. Because of this new way of looking at the environment and trying to involve and listen to the local interest in a specific area, the decision-making process is expected to be more legitimate and more widely supported. The new Act causes that the different interests involved in the implementation of a project already come to the surface in the beginning of the decision-making process. By using the input of all these different interests in the beginning of the process, instead of finding out in the end that there are many resistant actors that were not taken into account, can save time. Listening to all the interests involved in the beginning can also cause less resistance in the policy making process and therefore more legitimate and more supported decisions (Interview 1, civil servant Ministry of Home Affairs and Kingdom Relations in The Hague, 8 May 2018).

However, Nijenhuijs states that it’s of course not possible to always keep everyone in the local environment satisfied in the policy making process, but that with the new Act you can take as many different interests into account as possible and listen to what the local community has to say. The policy process will therefore become more legitimate. “In case you will get resistance, for example in the form of a judicial appeal, and you have taken all the involved interests into account, as the Environmental Planning Act prescribes, you are still standing very strong. You as a government can then also say to the judge, unfortunately we cannot satisfy everyone, but we have done everything we could to do so and listened to everyone, but choices just have to be made. This is different from what’s happening now, when you have a lot more resistance and also have to be mistier about the choices you made and the process you followed”, argues Nijenhuis (Rijksoverheid, 2018; Interview 1, civil servant Ministry of Home

(24)

Affairs and Kingdom Relations in The Hague, 8 May 2018).

The national government described that the new Act will make policy processes “easier, more efficient and better”. It became clear that the new Act can be seen as an improvement on the quality and legitimacy of the decision-making process and therefore considered to be “better”, but whether the new Act will make public policy “easier and more efficient” is something else. On the one hand it can be argued that because of the simplification of the environmental law and procedures it’s becoming easier and faster to start spatial planning projects. One of the greatest advantages of the new Act is that the policy practitioners, such as civil servants or businesses, don’t have to go through hundreds of different laws to see what is allowed and what is possible. Everything will now be integrated and bundled together which makes it easier to find out what the different possibilities in a specific area are. So with the knowledge of what is allowed in certain areas the Act will provide progress and causes that legal procedures can be shortened. However, on the other hand, it seems that the new ways of integral thinking and the integration of local knowledge and participation will not necessarily make it easier and more efficient to implement policies than before. Nijenhuis, who is also involved in the program “Working with the Environmental Planning Act” also noticed that the process of policy making for certain spatial projects might not become “easier and more efficient” as the Act describes it will, “that whole process of integral thinking and participation cannot be bound to time”. He states that in the creation of the Environmental Planning Act, it was found a very important item to fasten procedures, “everything must go faster, and that is indeed happening now that the procedures are shortened, but for me the ‘better’ is frankly more important and that can thus be achieved by an integrated approach and in looking whether you can reconcile different interests with each other, which creates an added value and more support” (Interview 1, civil servant Ministry of Home Affairs and Kingdom Relations in The Hague, 8 May 2018).

Joke van Wensem, who works for the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment at the department of Knowledge, Innovation and Strategy as senior adviser, confirms seeing this difficulty in practice and also argues that it’s probably not going to be “easier and more efficient” for a lot of local governmental domains. Involving the local environment in the early stadium of the policy process can be an improvement for the quality of the policy, but because municipalities then have to weigh so many different interests it’s not going to be any easier. Van Wensem argues that the Environmental Planning Act is a very experimental trajectory, “because you assume that if you give the local environment influence in the process of policy making it will automatically improve. Well, I’m not convinced of that” (Interview 2, civil

(25)

servant Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment, 16 May 2018). In her practice of working Van Wensem notices that some of the local governmental domains are so big, well equipped and already have so much experience that they take every opportunity to get started with the freedom the Environmental Planning Act offers them to implement spatial development projects. However, there are also still a lot of local governmental domains “who would rather get told by the national government what they have to do” (Interview 2, civil servant Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment, 16 May 2018).

Kristel Lammers works at the Association of Dutch Municipalities and is program manager of the implementation of the Environmental Planning Act at the level of municipalities and involved in “Working with the Environmental Planning Act”. In her practice it has also become clear that it’s not so easy to say that it simply gets “easier and more efficient”. She confirms that indeed some things will get simpler and that the new Act is in line with the developments in society, which is why it does justice to a number of issues. For doing small projects, such as getting permission for a dormer or an outbuilding, the Act provides an easier and simpler way because there are no more contradictory regulations. But at the same she noticed that “some things will really become more complex”. So because of the fact that various interests must be weighed up in conjunction, both within the municipal organizations and with the provinces, water board, and national executive organizations it will not become easier but only ‘’more complex and therefore more complicated’’ (Interview 3, civil servant Association of Dutch Municipalities, 22 May 2018).

The Environmental Planning Act starts at the local level and will cause that they will now have a lot more space. However, more space can also be difficult. Local governmental domains will get a lot more on their plates. There are still certain spatial development projects commissioned by the national government that municipalities need to implement, but now also with the integration of the local environment. Difficulties may arise whenever these national plans are not compatible with all the interests in the local environment. Before, municipalities could just argue towards their environment that they could not do anything about the policy, and that it’s just something that needs to be done from top-down. This will not be possible anymore, municipalities now have to defend and explain their policies their selves which is something many municipalities find scary and difficult. In these type of situations, when the local interests are not compatible with the vision of the government, the game of interests can become complex and not necessary “easier”. Lammers states that in her practice she notices that municipalities are not all used to working on something common in relation to their own interests, “and that is complicated” (Interview 3, civil servant Association of Dutch

(26)

Municipalities, 22 May 2018).

Thus, when translating the Act to practice, which gives the local level more space, local governmental domains must not forget that the national environmental vision also plays a role. On the one hand the Act tries to give space to decentralized authorities but on the other hand the national government also has certain goals when looking at spatial planning. The question this raises is how to ensure that within the space local authorities will get, the environmental vision from the national government will be followed. This might cause a dilemma in which there must be a consideration between more freedom of local governments and the vision of the national state. Municipal boards will now get more space, but they still need to take into account the national environmental vision, specific instructions, certain legal rules, and provincial direction. “Occasionally there will still be battle with power resources. It will undoubtedly clash, it’s s simply impossible to think that from now on it will all happen without friction. That is also not the idea of the Act, but it may still be possible to look as far as possible to see whether there are win-win situations”, according to Nijenhuis (Interview 1, civil servant Ministry of Home Affairs and Kingdom Relations in The Hague, 8 May 2018).

4.2 Local Knowledge

The new Environmental Planning Act causes the fact that local governmental domains now will have more freedom to create knowledge and make policies to their own needs and interests. Before, local governmental domains got top-down knowledge on the policies they had to implement, which often got contested by the different actors involved. Due to the involvement of the local environment in the early stages of the policy making process within the new Act, “different local perspectives, local knowledge and creativity will come to the surface quickly” (Rijksoverheid, 2018). Corburn (2007) states that because of the fact that the public and other actors now have a greater demand in public in the policy-making processes, policy makers need to find new ways of understanding and incorporating expertise with the contextual intelligence that people within the community have. This process leads to taking into account “community knowledge”, to find new ways of combining the expertise of professionals and scientists, with the contextual knowledge, or “local knowledge”, that community residents have (Corburn, 2007: 150). Local governmental domains can now be responsible for the input of bottom-up local knowledge, but this knowledge can also be held by members of a certain community which can be geographically located and contextual to specific groups (Corburn, 2007: 153).

This description of local knowledge can also be seen in the integration of the new Environmental Planning Act. This local knowledge can be provided by local governmental

The Environmental Planning Act : the integration of local knowledge and participation in public policy on the implementation of spatial development projects in The Netherlands