Introduction

Societies and governments are confronted with all kinds of different, but very often complex, problems, which have to be dealt with in an appropriate way. Examples are the regeneration of cities and regions, youth unemployment, or the ageing of the population. In order to deal with these problems, policies are developed and implemented. To some extent, the legitimacy of these policies depends on the ability of governments to understand the nature and effects of these problems, and on the capacity to generate elaborate insights into the possible outcomes of possible actions to be made and measures to be taken. That is why in the policy sciences, a lot of attention has been paid to the role of knowledge and especially to the role of knowledge that is produced by (applied) science or policy science-oriented institutions. This is called the science–policy nexus, which plays an important role in the world of policy analysis (Hoppe, 2005; see also Chapter Four). However, this nexus is not a default one, because the role that science and knowledge play depends on how scholars and practitioners conceptualise the course and content of policymaking processes. This also applies to the Netherlands. This nexus is even more questioned because science has lost its natural authority. It has become a contested issue.

In this chapter, I discuss how policy analysis has developed itself during the last decades in the Netherlands. This sketch is limited to the development of thinking in the Dutch university world, especially public administration and political science, in which the emphasis lies on explaining the content, course and outcomes of the policy process. The universities serve as an incubator for new developments in policy analysis, such as more interpretive modes of policy analysis. I will show that the role that knowledge and analysis have played was always a contested one. In order to understand this, I will first provide a frame of reference in which different perspectives on policymaking and policy analysis will be sketched. In the second section, an overview will be presented. Given this overview, in the third section, I will sketch the dominant ways of thinking in Dutch policy analysis. What can be shown from this overview is that pluriformity prevails.