In the last municipal elections, turnout in poor neighborhoods was very low. Administrators noted that the government now really needs to regain the trust of the public. Last year, fifteen mayors argued in the manifesto Close the gap! for more money for sixteen urban areas. Here, persistent social problems, growing dichotomy and deprivation dominate the daily lives of more than a million inhabitants. Former PvdA leader Lodewijk Asscher recently argued in the Thorbecke lecture that the inequality of opportunity in the Netherlands not only undermines individual lives, but also poses a threat to social peace.
About the author
Reinout Kleinhans is associate professor of urban renewal at TU Delft.
The government’s response came recently, with the National Liveability and Safety Program. The objective is to improve the quality of life and safety of the most vulnerable areas in the Netherlands within 15 to 20 years and to improve the perspective of the residents. The focus is on the future prospects of young people. It is good that the government is structurally investing heavily in improving the quality of education, especially in schools with learning disadvantages. Stimulating education and paid work should prevent young people from succumbing to the temptations of quick money in organized crime. Prevention and home improvement are also an absolute necessity.
Show of mistrust
Unfortunately, the Program misses the mark on other points. First of all, the residents of the twenty selected focus areas are poorly affected in terms of influence. The idea is that the municipality, social and private partners, together with residents, formulate and elaborate the goals and ambitions in a long-term programme.
After ten years of policy rhetoric about the ‘participation society’, ‘own strength’ and ‘self-reliance’ of residents, the daily reality is completely different. At certain times, residents are allowed to join a controlled participation process in which their input makes no real difference.
The Ministry of the Interior has not heeded the call from society, practice and science to give residents a serious position as experts by experience. Nor does the program contain any concrete clues to do this. This will be interpreted as a sign of mistrust towards residents.
Scots and Arrangements
Secondly, the National Program describes its own failure factors: compartmentalised policy practice, fragmentation and poor cooperation between sectors and actors. In practice, integrated working is made difficult by the imposed partitions, regulations, hour budgets, and complex accountability methods.
Youth workers, community nurses, teachers, police officers and housing consultants who work daily in the poor neighborhoods have been asking for years to tackle this problem at the root. The National Program mainly aims at ‘creating space for experiments and customization’ and investigating which adjustments are necessary in the legal instruments. That feels like mustard after dinner now that these professionals have so often indicated where the shoe pinches.
Painful history
Third, the steering. The painful history of neighborhood policy is repeated here. A complicated and time-consuming administrative structure is imposed from above. The magic words are interdepartmental working groups, ‘alliance consultations’, program offices and a ‘sound monitoring and accountability system’.
The National Program thus (unintentionally) suggests that there is no meaningful programming, management and monitoring taking place locally. This imposed structure sucks a lot of energy and capacity away from the implementation of the much-needed measures, or rolls over existing, well-functioning forms of cooperation.
Control
The National Program aims to improve the perspective of residents in the most vulnerable neighbourhoods. Those residents and executive professionals are poorly listened to, said former vice president of the Council of State Herman Tjeenk Willink and SCP director Kim Putters. This distrust threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We can prevent this. The National Partnership for Active Residents (LSA) and the National Platform for Buurt- en Wijk-oriented Werken (LPB) have, together with knowledge institutions, developed a Manifesto for a Successful Neighborhood Approach drawn up. This manifesto describes a neighborhood approach of and with the neighborhood in nine concrete key points. The experience and agenda of residents are leading in this. This method makes it possible to achieve the goals of the National Programme. If you give residents trust and control, you also restore trust. Wasn’t that the mission of the Rutte IV cabinet?