Dutch urban governance: multi-level of multi-scalar?

Abstract

Many accounts of urban governance emphasize municipal and neighbourhood scales, featuring local participation, social cohesion and the relationship between local government and residents. By contrast, our focus is the vertical governance processes of integrated urban policies. We concentrate on the effectiveness of the steering of urban policies. Using a Dutch city as a case study, we evaluate local stakeholders’ experiences in the vertical governance processes of integrated urban policy and the extent to which their experiences fit in with the theoretical notions of multi-level governance or multi-scalar meta-governance and the EU principles of good governance. The key result is that Dutch urban policy incorporates dominant neo-liberal multi-scalar meta-governance, owing to the simultaneously strong market orientation and state regulation. The legitimacy of urban policy is brought into question when city authorities have very little influence on its contents but are judged on its results. The major lesson learned is that neo-liberal centralistic steering in the core domains of local government that aim to achieve effective and coherent urban governance practices is counterproductive.