Calling on the Community: Understanding Participation in the Heritage Sector, an Interactive Governance Perspective

There is a call in Heritage Studies to democratize heritage practices and place local communities at the forefront; heritage plays an important role in identity formation, and therefore in social inclusion and exclusion. Public participation is often presented as the primary means to prioritize communities. However, studies focusing on public participation are typically descriptive in nature and lack a strong analytical framework that enables us to understand participation. The essays in this volume apply Public Administration theory to collaborative governance and thus contribute to a better understanding of public participation in the heritage sector.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jan 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781800738393

Book preview

Introduction

Jeroen Rodenberg, Pieter Wagenaar and Gert-Jan Burgers

The Importance of Participation

To determine which heritage sites within the Kingdom of the Netherlands could be nominated for consideration as a world heritage site, the State Secretary for Culture, Halbe Zijlstra, installed an expert committee on 8 March 2010. In assessing the eligibility of possible sites, the Committee applied the UNESCO guidelines; namely, ‘authenticity’, ‘exceptionality’ and ‘universality’. Among the heritage sites proposed by the Committee was the Noordoostpolder, the world’s largest polder. The heritage experts concluded that this polder represented an exponent of the twentieth-century ideal of social engineering. In designing the polder, after all, landscape planners and architects had drawn out the agricultural parcels in a consistent and coherent manner and used Chrystaller’s ‘central place theory’ to plan the polder’s central town and villages. These spatial characteristics are still visible and, according to the committee, of unique and universal value (Commissie Herziening Voorlopige Lijst Werelderfgoed 2010: 21–24, 41–42). After the Committee presented its tentative list, the State Secretary still had to approve it. He promised to do so provided there was sufficient local support. Although the mayor and aldermen of the municipality of the Noordoostpolder were initially in favour of placing the polder on the tentative list, the local community was divided on the plan. Opponents argued that a heritage label was being imposed on them from above that was inconsistent with their perception of the polder heritage, which was based on the agricultural use of the landscape. Nominating the polder as a world heritage site would impede their desire to scale up the outdated agricultural parcels. In the face of the growing resistance within the local community to the imposed heritage discourse, local administrative support quickly evaporated, and the State Secretary decided to remove the Noordoostpolder from the list (Rodenberg 2015). The Noordoostpolder thus presents a remarkable – and for some heritage scholars within the school of Critical Heritage Studies perhaps hopeful – case, one in which an Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) (Smith 2006) ultimately lost out in a decision-making process to a community discourse. Would things have turned out differently if the Noordoostpolder ‘community’ had been involved at an earlier stage? Would it have been possible to integrate their discourse and the AHD? If so, how does one achieve involvement of the local communities in governance?

Outline of the Volume

For several years, Heritage Studies scholars have been paying attention to participation in heritage governance; a phenomenon called ‘interactive governance’ in the discipline of Public Administration. An important explanation for this is the desire to enable communities to develop their own heritage discourse rather than being subjected to an AHD that is alien to them (see for example Smith 2006) or as a way to mitigate contestation (Korostelina 2019). Studies of such governance processes therefore abound, but, curiously, they seldom make use of Public Administration theory (PA). This is all the more striking given that scholars working in this academic discipline have been studying interactive governance for decades. For us, this is a reason to devote an entire book to the insights developed by students of public administration and how heritage scholars could draw from these.

The book is organized as follows. We begin with two theoretical chapters. The first provides an overview of PA thinking on interactive governance and forms the theoretical framework of the book. Yet, Public Administration is not the only scholarly discipline in which interactive governance is discussed. Political philosophers also have something to say, which is why we have added a second theoretical chapter. In it we demonstrate that interactive governance is often inspired by Habermasian notions of the ideal speech situation, something that has not gone without criticism in political philosophy. The remainder of the book consists of case studies. On the basis of these, we try to assess to what extent the concepts developed in PA are applicable to the field of heritage. However, theories about interactive governance are not the only benefits that can be drawn from PA. Indeed, heritage scholars are quite often concerned with governance. PA is therefore also relevant to those who are interested in more than just its interactive forms. This is why in the first chapter of the book, we offer a very brief and very personal overview of other bodies of PA theory that may also be of benefit to Heritage Studies.

Fundamental Concepts

Before we go any further, we first need to clarify what we mean by some of the terms we use. The first one we need to deal with is ‘public administration’. When we use the word without capitals we mean ‘government’ in its broadest sense.‘Public Administration’ with capitals is then the academic discipline studying it.¹

The definition of ‘governance’ is somewhat trickier. In 1995, the Public Administration scholar Rhodes remarked that the word had changed in meaning and now referred to at least six new developments in public administration. These ranged from ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) to ‘good governance’, and from the minimal state to the way private companies are run (Rhodes 1996). We here use the term in the original sense of the word, to mean ‘the act of governing’ (Emerson, Nabatchi and Balogh 2011: 2). ‘Interactive governance’ will be defined in the second chapter of this book.

There are also two concepts that emerge from Heritage Studies we need to define. Without dwelling on the debates surrounding the concept of ‘cultural heritage’, we define it briefly as ‘a social and cultural practice, enacted by communities and individuals, in which histories are selected or rejected’ (Rodenberg and Wagenaar 2018: 2; cf. Smith 2006). The term ‘Authorized Heritage Discourse’, which has already been mentioned, was coined by Smith. It refers to a dominant heritage discourse, often articulated by experts, which exists at the expense of subaltern discourses (Smith 2006). Now we have made our concepts clear, it is time to take a closer look at what the field of PA has to offer Heritage Studies.

Jeroen Rodenberg has an MA in Medieval History and a MSc in Public Administration (Leiden University). He is a lecturer and Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Public Administration and Political Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, with research interests in heritage governance and policy and the history of public administration. He is involved in the pan-European research and training project on heritage planning HERILAND. Currently, he is completing his dissertational research on competing heritage policy discourses in decision-making processes.

Dr Pieter Wagenaar is an assistant professor at the Department of Public Administration and Political Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research interests are the history of administration and the administration of history. At present, he is focused on interactive governance in the heritage sector. He is involved in the HERILAND project: a pan-European research and training network on cultural heritage in relation to Spatial Planning and Design.

Dr Gert-Jan Burgers has a chair in Heritage of Cultural Landscapes and Urban Environments at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is also director of CLUE+, the Vrije Universiteit interfaculty research institute for Culture, Cognition, History and Heritage, and project leader of the International Training Network HERILAND, Cultural Heritage and the Planning of European Landscapes, financed by the EU H2020 Marie Sklodowska Curie scheme.

NOTE

1. Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics, 3rd edn. (Oxford University Press 2009).

References

Commissie Herziening voorlopige lijst werelderfgoed. 2010. Uitzonderlijk en universeel: Voorlopige lijst Unesco werelderfgoed Koninkrijk der Nederlanden. [s.l].

Emerson, K., T. Nabatchi and S. Balogh. 2012. ‘An Integrative Framework for Collaborative Governance’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 22(1): 1–29.

Korostelina, A.V. 2019. ‘Understanding Values of Cultural Heritage within the Framework of Social Identity Conflicts’, in E. Avrami, S. Macdonald, R. Mason and D. Myers (eds), Values in Heritage Management: Emerging Approaches and Research Directions. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, pp. 83–96.

Rhodes, R.A.W. 1996. ‘The New Governance: Governing without Government’, Political Studies 44(4): 652–67.

Rodenberg, J. 2015. ‘De bestuurlijke omgang met verleden, heden en toekomst: of hoe de Noordoostpolder geen Werelderfgoed werd’, in R. van Diepen, W. van der Most and H. Pruntel (eds), Polders peilen. Lelystad: Stichting Uitgeverij De Twaalfde Provincie, pp. 130–53.

Rodenberg, J., and P. Wagenaar. 2018. ‘Cultural Contestation: Heritage, Identity and the Role of Government’, in J. Rodenberg and F.P. Wagenaar (eds), Cultural Contestation: Heritage, Identity and the Role of Government. Cham: Palgrave McMillan, pp. 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91914-0_1.

Smith, L. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London and New York: Routledge.

PART I

FRAMEWORK

Theories of Heritage, Public Administration and Political Science

CHAPTER 1

Understanding the Governance of Heritage

A Plea for Using Public Administration Theories in Heritage Studies

Jeroen Rodenberg and Pieter Wagenaar

A Plea for Public Administration

Over the past few years, The Netherlands has been fragmented by a conflict surrounding the country’s most beloved tradition: the festivity of Saint Nicholas. The root of the controversy is the physical appearance of the figure of Zwarte Piet, Saint Nicholas’ companion, wearing black-face. Although government actively participates in the festival, as sponsor and facilitator of Saint Nicholas-related events, it tries to distance itself from the controversy. But several governmental actors, most notably the Mayor of Amsterdam, have made an effort to solve the problem (Rodenberg and Wagenaar 2016; Wagenaar and Rodenberg 2018).

One could analyse this debate using concepts and theories stemming from Heritage Studies and argue, for instance, that the figure is part of a Dutch AHD, which constructs and expresses an envisioned national identity focused on ‘white middle-class values’. As it neglects the identities of minority groups, opposition to this discourse has turned the festivity into ‘contested heritage’. Yet, such an approach would fall short in several ways, most importantly negating the role government plays.

As many of our colleagues will acknowledge, Smith’s (2006) concept of the AHD has been vital to the discipline of Critical Heritage Studies. Those who use it interpret ‘heritage’ as a social and cultural practice, construed by a dominant discourse and authorized by government. They have demonstrated how this discourse inevitably excludes participation of various groups in society. The next step has not yet been taken, though. The aforementioned concept, after all, seminal as it is, does not provide us with the tools to analyse why government acts as it does. This difficulty – having to explain what government does but lacking the tools to analyse why – rears its head in Heritage Studies time and again. Therefore, we argue that the multidisciplinary field of critical Heritage Studies should fundamentally include the discipline of Public Administration. Moreover, if practising Critical Heritage Studies implies a wish to influence policy, as Smith’s remarks during the ACHS conference in 2018 imply,¹ knowledge of the way (governmental) actors actually motivate policy is of the essence.

However, a wish to comprehend and influence the role governments play in heritage practices is not the principal reason why we call for the inclusion of Public Administration theory. We feel government should be one of the field’s central research objects. Critical Heritage Studies, after all, originated as a critique on the way governments attribute heritage (Harrison 2013: 96–97; Silberman 1995). The fact that heritage is being instrumentalized for other purposes still solicits much attention. Yet, over time, heritage scholars’ scrutiny of government has dwindled. Perhaps this can best be explained by the fact that the disciplines who contribute most to Heritage Studies – (art)history, archaeology and anthropology – lack the tools to analyse it.

We obviously do not wish to assert that heritage scholars do not pay attention to government at all. They do. Often. But in their analyses, it is usually but one of many actors. As it is not central to their analyses, heritage scholars usually do not feel compelled to seek theories dealing with government exclusively. This was apparent during the 2018 ACHS conference, where there was much mention of government in many presentations but very little theoretical substantiation thereof.

Attention for Public Administration and Governance in Heritage Studies

Adding PA to the disciplines that comprise Heritage Studies implies broadening the theoretical base, which of late has already grown extensively. Although Heritage Studies still focuses heavily on the empirical, this does not detract from the theoretical base of the discipline anymore. Ever since Laurajane Smith’s ‘ACHS Manifest’ in 2012 asked for a more thorough theoretical grounding of the field, and advocated looking towards the social sciences for inspiration, a lot has happened (Smith 2012). There has been a clear shift towards an ever more integrated field of ‘Critical Heritage Studies’ that references ‘critical theory’ to provide its theoretical frameworks. It might remain unclear what these frameworks are going to look like. We may be uncertain what we mean by ‘critical’, or ‘critical theory’ (see for example Winter 2013 on the term ‘critical’). We might also group very different entities under this common denominator, and ultimately few of the many colleagues who work under the flag of the ACHS will unanimously embrace the form of ‘die-hard’ critical theory proposed by the Frankfurter Schule. Yet, as far as we are concerned, this lack of theoretical clarity does not matter. Given that being critical presupposes a conceptualization of the object of study that is as broad as possible, using the full range of theories available, a shared paradigm emerges over time with the further augmentation of the discipline. It need not necessarily be explicit at the outset.

Figure 1.1. Studying the governance of heritage: Five levels of analysis and selected suitable PA theories. Figure created by the authors.

The object of study is certainly broad. Heritage scholars pay attention to a plethora of themes: from religion to memory, from sustainable development to emotion, from landscapes to gastronomy.² Certainly not all of these relate to governance, but if we view them from the perspective of heritage-society-governance, we see a range of core themes emerging that could be studied using PA theory. In this chapter, we certainly do not intend to subdivide these into exclusive categories but rather into overlapping themes. We do not attempt to offer a complete overview of the field either, rather we offer to help those heritage scholars who are confronted with the fact that they need to know more about Public Administration theory to orientate themselves. In the next sections, we look at PA theory using a funnel to guide us through several levels of analysis. We begin at the highest level, that of the state in its entirety, to end with the lowest, where the individual citizen confronts bureaucracy. In the discussion of the different levels, we start by asking ourselves what Heritage Studies scholars are currently doing and then consider what PA could further contribute.

Heritage and Polity

At the highest level, where the state as a whole administers heritage, Heritage Studies have contributed a lot of significant content. There is actually very little PA could still add. ‘Why do states engage with heritage?’ is the pertinent question here. According to critical heritage scholars, they do so for two interlinked reasons, both related to the coming into being of the nation-state in the context of ‘modernity’. Harrison (2013) writes that ‘modernity’ is characterized by a feeling of ‘loss’ and a wish to manage risks. Loss itself is such a risk, and state bureaucracies, in general, go through great pains to mitigate it. This also happens in the domain of heritage. Experts are the people looked upon to map the risks of loss, to estimate the value of what could be lost and to propose measures to limit the risks. In Western Europe, all this has resulted in the founding of specialized bureaucracies, laws and regulations, and the listing of monuments that need to be protected (Harrison 2013). In North America, similar measures have been put into place (Valadares 2018).

Feelings of nationalism, characteristic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were the drivers behind said measures. In Western Europe, monumental buildings were viewed as expressions and highlights of a shared past over time, connecting the members of a nation. Losing them would endanger the nation’s very foundations. The measures taken aimed to temper the destructive force of ‘modernity’ and industrialization (Harrison 2013). State protection of heritage also served to legitimize the state. Archaeological finds became the carriers of the state’s narratives about state and people (Silberman 1995); a practice that has still not disappeared (Volchevska 2018). Often it even turned out to be necessary to ‘invent’ heritage for this purpose (Hobsbawm and Ranger [1983] 2012).

From the nineteenth century onwards, heritage in the West became subject to bureaucratic standardization, centralization and planning and control. Local customs, including the way heritage was handled and perceived, thus became part of national values and administrative regimes (Harrison 2013). In the twentieth century, once the West had adopted the practice of heritage ‘listing’, and this practice had become enshrined in national heritage regimes, it transferred its policies to the international and even global level. These policies then became UNESCO’s guiding principles. After this approach to heritage listing and categorization had become part of a global AHD, it was then ‘transposed’ (as PA scholars would say) back from the global to the national and local levels all over the world (Harrison 2013; Smith 2006).

Heritage and Policy

The second level of analysis is that of heritage policy. At this level, three questions are important. The first one concerns the effects of heritage policies. In the field of heritage, this question is usually answered through research into the effects of management and conservation measures, which are part of rules and regulations aimed at preserving material heritage. It departs from a classical heritage management approach and is often executed by, for instance, experts on restoration or landscape architects working for municipalities or museums. There is plenty of it in academe as well, conducted by material experts in departments of art history, archaeology and architectural history. The focus of this kind of research is on the consequences of certain interventions for heritage in terms of loss of intrinsic heritage values. One could think of archaeological value mapping or trying to establish the effects of the construction of a freeway on the intrinsic archaeological value of a landscape. It is dominant in, for instance, the Journal of Cultural Heritage, which focuses on research into ‘technology for conservation and awareness’.³

What Public Administration theory could add to this approach are the research methods developed in the field of ‘policy analysis’. Especially valuable is the literature on ‘policy evaluation’ and ‘policy learning’. The field of policy evaluation provides almost ready-made social science methods for research on the effects of, for instance, city regeneration projects. Yet, another important takeaway from this body of literature is just how hard evaluation is. Because the aims of policies are often formulated vaguely, it is usually difficult to conclude anything meaningful about their success or failure. Organizations do have opportunities to learn from evaluations (Howlett and Giest 2015), but the degree to which an organization is capable of doing this depends on its ability to process new information. To this day, findings have not been hopeful (Cohen and Levinthal 1990).

A second question concerns the effects of heritage policies in terms of power relations, social inclusion and exclusion, and identity politics. This type of question is at the core of what we nowadays call Critical Heritage Studies. A concept from Public Administration that could add to it has been formulated by the sociologist Robert K. Merton (1936). He points at the ‘unintended consequences’ of certain policies. Government bureaucracies may act rationally, but the goals they set themselves always produce unforeseen outcomes. The conservation policies adopted by governments for monuments in the twentieth century, for instance, had as their goal the drawing up of lists of edifices that needed to be preserved. At the time, no one realized the effect this might have on social cohesion. Even policies that ‘instrumentalize’ heritage to further social cohesion might have social exclusion as an effect. The concept of unintended consequences helps explain this (Merton 1936).

If we look at existing literature on heritage policies, it becomes clear that it is especially policy outcomes that have drawn attention and not the processes that have produced these. This should come as no surprise, as from the daily practice of conserving heritage, it is exactly these outcomes that are noticeable. If adherence to a classical perspective on preservation ‘heritage’ is a given, it can become jeopardized because of how we treat our environment. Heritage policy then becomes a researchable and rather technical matter. For adherents to a critical approach, it is effects on social power relations, specifically social inclusion and exclusion, that are of importance.

In the field of spatial planning, though, there is attention to the question of why and how certain policies are adopted. Yet scholars working in this field are more focused on methods for planning and justifying spatial interventions – for example, the landscape biography approach (Kolen, Renes and Bosma 2016) – than on theories explaining the planning process. However, in their analyses, sometimes ideas pop up that have crossed the divide with Public Administration. A beautiful example is a study of the decision-making process concerning Enning Road, which makes use of Paul Sabatier’s (1988) concept of the ‘Advocacy Coalition Framework’. Lee uses this theory to show how the different ‘beliefs’ of the actors structure interaction processes, and how because of an emerging new and shared ‘belief’ one of the policy coalitions gains the upper hand. This is how the principles underlying spatial planning shift from ‘property led’ to ‘heritage conservation led’ (Lee 2016). It is in the answers to this third question, on why certain choices regarding heritage policy are made, that Public Administration can make its largest contribution. Here it has decision-making theories to offer that not only explain the process but also provide means of changing the status quo.

The (many) decision-making theories Public Administration knows can be divided into three approaches (Frederickson and Smith 2003: 161–83). The first one is the rational approach, which looks for scientific ways to make policy attain the goals politics has set (Axelrod 1976; Huff 1990). Then there is an approach influenced by Herbert Simon’s concept of ‘bounded-rationality’: the observation that our capacity for rational decision-making is far too limited for the problems policymakers are confronted with, which is why they are satisficers rather than maximizers (Simon [1947] 2013); an example is Charles Lindblom’s ‘incremental model’, which explains outcomes by looking at the policy process as one of trial and error in many small steps (Lindblom 1959). Peter Hall’s application of Kuhn’s ideas on scientific paradigm shifts to policy might also prove to be valuable (Hall 1993). The third, and in our opinion most useful approach for Heritage Studies, could be called the ‘irrational’ one. The theories in this category assign important roles to chance (Cohen, March and Olsen 1972; Kingdon 1995), to the power of rhetoric (Edelman 1967, 1977) or to power positions (Bachrach and Baratz 1970) in explaining how policies come about.

Heritage and Administrative Practice

The third level of analysis concerns the relation between heritage and ‘administrative practice’. At this level, questions about how and why public heritage institutions act the way they do emerge. Obviously, such questions are closely related to the way policy is made, the subject of the previous section, but here the focus is on patterns in the behaviour of single actors. Heritage Studies actually involves quite a lot of analysis at this level; often in the form of careful empirical descriptions of government actions resulting in heritage policy or the effects of it. Yet, the problem is that these usually do not make use of PA theory.

There are important exceptions, though, for instance in Bendix et al.’s edited volume Heritage Regimes and the State (2013). All the authors in this book try to answer the question of how heritage regimes structure the behaviour of bureaucracies. Using ethnography as their prime methodology, they focus on international (UNESCO) heritage treaties, which create new national heritage regimes and government institutions. What these then do is not only determined by the treaties but also by the pre-existing national rules and regulations, administrative regimes and patterns of bureaucratic behaviour. Tauschek (2013), for instance, demonstrates how this leads to several different heritage regimes in Germany, as it is a federal republic and the separate ‘Bundesländer’ each have their own specific administrative context. Fournier (2013) shows how after a wave of decentralization heritage policy was one of the few areas in which the French central state still remained competent. Consequently, it strengthened its grip on this sector. In the same volume, Rosemary J. Coombe (2013) reflects on the contributions to it on a more abstract level. Using the work of Michel Foucault she describes ‘managing cultural heritage as Neoliberal Governmentality’. Coombe argues that heritage regimes are neoliberal in nature because of the dominance of market thinking, the appreciation of heritage in terms of investments and gains, and because a retreating government leaves room for private heritage initiatives.

Obviously, this volume is not the only publication that focuses on the way government deals with heritage, but it is among the rare works that take a Public Administration perspective. There are a few scholars who have done the same, though. A beautiful example is Christina Maags (2018), who applies the concept of multilevel governance (more about this in the following). She analyses how tasks and competences are divided between the various governmental levels in China, the way this structures their actions and why this leads to bureaucratic infighting.

With Maags (2018) and with Bendix, Eggert and Peselmann’s (2013) volume we have entered the realm of Public Administration theory. They clearly illustrate its value for Heritage Studies as a rich source for explaining the actions of government instutions. In the following, we will discuss several theory sub-clusters we feel are directly applicable as well. To organize our material, in this section we use the same principle we applied to this chapter as a whole. Starting at the metalevel, we slowly work our way down to theories explaining the behaviour of single institutions, and even individual administrators.

In the first instance, we would like to draw attention to a cluster of theories surrounding the concept of ‘governance’ – thinking about the design and operation of public administration as a process. In Public Administration theory, theories departing from this notion are especially New Public Management (NPM) (Hood 1991), multilevel governance (Hooghe and Marks 2002; Hooghe, Marks and Schakel 2020), Rhodes’ hollow state thesis (Rhodes 1996) and network theory (Klijn and Koppenjan 2015; Marsh and Rhodes 1992).

NPM is an important and highly normative theory. It describes how public administration should ideally be organized and prescribes a specific mode of action. From the 1990s until recently, it was a highly dominant practice. As a reaction to public administration heavily interfering in all societal domains, and to rising costs of government in times of economic crisis, the idea emerged that government should play a much more modest role in society, should leave much of its activities to the market, and, if government interference really could not be avoided, should organize itself in ways that as much as possible imitated private business practices. In sum: it needed to be ‘entrepreneurial’ (Osborne and Gaebler 1993). These principles were indeed adopted to a high degree in the English-speaking countries, and various continental European states followed their lead. Global institutions like the World Bank and the IMF then spread them all over the world. From the start, NPM was not just a normative theory but also functioned as an analytical tool to understand public administration and, as such, was heavily criticized by many scholars working in the field (Hood 1991). That parts of heritage ‘management’ (sic!) are left to the market is readily explicable if one departs from NPM. The same goes for quite a lot of governmental heritage policy at the start of this century and the last decades of the previous one. If the proceeds from heritage do not exceed the costs, it is easily understandable why an entrepreneurial government does not act.

Another cluster of theories explaining the retreat of (central) government concerns multilevel governance (Hooghe and Marks 2002; Hooghe Marks and Schakel 2020). Multilevel governance points to the development of central government no longer initiating policy itself, as it did in the heydays of the welfare-state, but closely cooperating with decentralized and supranational government levels. As we have seen, Maags (2018) uses this perspective to explain why different government levels in China adopt different heritage policy goals and then get into conflict with each other. A closely related concept is called ‘transposition’. This relates to governmental bodies on a national or supranational level making policies that then need to be adopted by lower-level administrations but change during this process. Tauschek (2013) shows how this works in the FRG.

With his hollow-state thesis Rhodes (1996) also points at the ever-weaker position of central government. Because of decentralization processes started in the eighties, and which had as their goals the strengthening of local democracy, improved service delivery and budget cuts, tasks and competences of central government have been transferred down to the local level, or up to the EU. And this has not been the end of it: institutions and tasks were also privatized (Rhodes 1996). Rhodes’ ideas, of course, closely mirror Fournier’s (2013) analysis discussed above.

The consequences are studied by network theory. This cluster departs from the observation that the process of governing takes place in complex networks consisting of public and private actors in configurations that vary depending on the issue at hand. In many instances, central government is no longer in a position to take the lead. The behaviour of the various actors in these governance networks is then explained with the use of ‘dependency theory’. It is the goals actors have and the resources they can mobilize that explain their actions and relations (Kickert, Klijn and Koppenjan 1997; Marsh and Rhodes 1992). The case of the Dutch Noordoostpolder presented earlier illustrates how interdependencies between actors in a governance network led to an unexpected policy outcome: the polder never attained world heritage status, despite central government putting it on its tentative list (Rodenberg 2015). Contrary to the French case (Fournier 2013) the Dutch central state has been hollowed out in the field of heritage, Rodenberg finds. It now depends on the cooperation of other public and private actors and cannot always get its own way.

Public Administration theory clusters specifically aimed at explaining behaviour fall under the heading of institutional theories. Vivien Schmidt (2008) distinguishes between four of these, which use different perspectives on institutions