Generations of interactive policy-making in the Netherlands

Abstract

In two previous articles in this journal, I posed the hypothesis that policy generations exist and are able to explain policy changes (De Vries, 1999, 2002). Those articles argued that shifts in the dominant policy goals and the policy instruments being dominant in public policy-making processes occur periodically and simultaneously, congruent with the predictions derived from a model on policy generations. This article completes the trilogy by analyzing shifts in the relations between policy-makers and various societal actors. It argues that these shifts also reflect the periodical changes in the design of policy-making processes and that they occur simultaneously with the shifts in policy goals and the dominant policy instruments used. This supports the hypothesis that major policy change can be understood as a shift in attention simultaneously visible in the policy goals, the instruments used and the role of societal actors; that it is a periodical change; and that such change can be theoretically explained and predicted by the necessary neglect of aspects of policy-making not addressed in the previous period.