We analyze two citizen collectives of ‘professional city makers’ who have shaped participation in circular area development in anticipation of the Dutch Environment and Planning Act. The activities of professional city-makers form an interesting new phenomenon that requires attention as well as the implications: it is precisely through the professionalism of the city-makers’ efforts that there is a regular tension in the participation process between their role as citizen and professional in their contact with the government. We therefore discuss how the participation of professional city-makers in area development exposes different paradoxes that must be taken into account in the further implementation of the Environment and Planning Act. In short, we argue that participation in the Act is presented in a traditional way and does not fit the new role of citizens in area development in the 21st century.

Public participation is an important issue in the forthcoming Dutch Environment and Planning Act (2021). The importance of participation is emphasized in numerous places in the parliamentary documents to the Act. This contribution discusses how the new Act gives legal substance to the objectives that the government is pursuing regarding participation and whether the involvement of citizens is indeed better imbedded by this act. It addresses the important subject of the ‘right moment of participation’ in the fragmented Dutch policy and decision system. Consecutively it deals with the question of potential legal consequences for non-compliance by administrative bodies to the legal participation obligations when drawing up plans and decisions. Can a citizen enforce (substantive) participation in the administrative court after the Environmental and Planning Act comes into force? The possibilities are limited. Findings show that the new Environment and Planning Act does not address the essential problems that arise with participation. The successful creation of local support, better quality and faster decision-making through participation all depend on how the (local) government shapes participation. From a legal perspective, the Environment and Planning Act makes little contribution to this. In the view of the authors this is not surprising, because the role of legislation in safeguarding substantive participation should not be overestimated.

The Environment and Planning Act (EPA), which will enter into force in 2021, has been called the most influential legislative reform in the Netherlands since World War II. This article forms the introduction to a special issue devoted to the EPA, in which scholars from various disciplines reflect on the societal and legal ramifications of this new act. The authors introduce the different articles but also offer their perspective on the emergence of this new field of research. Socio-legal research into such a vast new regulatory field benefits from the application of multiple perspectives and different research methods. Conspicuously, the authors of the various articles differ on how to assess the new regulation of Dutch spatial planning. Some are pessimistic, others strike a more optimistic note. In this introduction two more perspectives on the law are offered. The perspective of prefigurative law (Davina Cooper) embodies the more optimistic view, whilst the perspective of outsourced law (Pauline Westerman) sides with the pessimists.

The development of the Environment and Planning Act (Omgevingswet) in the Netherlands is an example of an ongoing reform of environmental and planning law that started with big ambitions. This article uses the case of environmental space (gebruiksruimte) to illustrate that it is hard to achieve those ambitions. A bill of the Environment and Planning Act contained regulations to assign environmental space to actors and/or locations. The regulations lacked in subsequent versions of the Environment and Planning Act, especially in the act itself. Despite the fact that on policy level the concept of environmental space can still be used, the lack of a legally binding mechanism for assigning environmental space makes it unlikely that the concept will be used. This hampers realising the ambition to create coherent policies that integrate environmental and spatial planning. It also puts achieving the goal of the law at risk.

The Crisis and Recovery Act and the Environmental Planning Act are analysed in this article as a form of communicative legislation. This approach to socio-legal analysis draws attention to the need to understand the symbolic effects of legislation as independent drivers of compliance. The modest legal effects of the Crisis and Recovery Act are contrasted with the more sizeable symbolic effects of this legalisation. In addition, the ex-ante evaluation of the Environmental Planning Act shows that the proposed legal changes can only provide a small impetus to the desired culture change, nonetheless there is potential for areas of this law to have symbolic effects as well. These could potentially contribute independently to its success.

Research on the significance of representation indicates that lawyers contribute to positive outcomes of legal procedures not only by their substantive expertise but also by the relational expertise they bring. The latter involves understanding how to navigate the relationships involved in getting work done. In this paper these insights are used to investigate the highly specific and atypical practise of the preliminary reference procedure in the European legal system in order to reveal how lawyers deal with such an unexpected change of (legal) context. The empirical data, collected through semi-structured interviews with twenty-eight lawyers with past experience with the procedure, reveals the significant ways in which lawyers’ positive contribution to such cases is undermined by their lack of both substantive and relational expertise in pleading a case before the European Court of Justice. The fact that such cases do not necessarily fall into the hands of the professionals best equipped to plead such disputes before the Court, and the inability of the less well-off parties in particular to hire further expertise, points in the direction of a disadvantaged position for this group of litigants in having their interest represented effectively at the European level.

In the past five years, the Council of State, the National Ombudsman and several academics have criticized the way in which new legislation has been made. In their view, principles of law and the rule of law are insufficiently uphold due to an instrumentalist view on law. This criticism urged the authors to conduct an empirical study into the question how legislative drafters deal with legislative plans which are problematic from a legal or rule of law point of view, and how they justify their role in the legislative process. This study is explorative and qualitative in nature. During the summer of 2018, 24 legislative lawyers from five different Dutch ministries have been interviewed. The results show that the role of legislative lawyers can best be characterized as constructively critical. As their tasks encompass much more than solely the actual drafting of legislation, they more and more resemble their colleagues from the policy department. The authors suggest that legislative lawyers should articulate their distinctive professional ethics in order to strengthen the checks and balances within the ministries.

Victims who suffer severe damages due to the act of a violent crime can request state compensation from the Dutch Violent Offences Compensation Fund (VOCF). VOCF workers who decide on these requests use their discretionary powers to translate the VOCF’s rules and policy into concrete actions. This study investigated (1) to what extent these VOCF workers match Lipsky’s definition of street-level bureaucrats and (2) what routines and heuristics they use to deal with time and information constraints. On the basis of document analysis and interviews, we found that the decision makers of the VOCF can to a certain extent be seen as street-level bureaucrats. To make decisions timely, some of them use routines such as the ‘downstream orientation’. This means that they award requests for compensation if they think that the applicant would be able to successfully contest a rejecting decision. To deal with a lack of information, they sometimes include a review clause in the text of a rejection decision. The use of heuristics was not found among the lawyers who decide in first instance, but in case of appeal hearings heuristics such as the affect and representativeness heuristic seem to play a role in the decision-making process. Future research should investigate whether these routines and heuristics lead to disparities in outcomes.

This paper analyses how street-level bureaucrats in the Netherlands decide on detaining asylum seekers. The paper is based on interviews with officers of the national police and the military police who take these decisions as part of their job. The relevant Dutch and European legal rules are not clear and unambiguous and the officers are given wide margins of discretion in making these decisions. Many interviewees said that they ultimately rely on their ‘feelings’. The paper therefore pays special attention to whether and how gut feelings and emotions of the officers influence their decision-making. In addition, the paper examines whether and how the increased use of ICTs and the Europeanisation of migration and asylum law have reduced the officers’ discretion and autonomy.

This article is about the work of Wibo van Rossum who passed away in April 2018. Trained as a legal anthropologist he has conducted empirical research on the administration of justice in the Netherlands for many years. This anthology is about four research reports he produced and many articles he has written in two decades. This article provides an academic as well as a practical review of his work.

This quantitative empirical research project describes how notaries evaluate disciplinary jurisdiction. Findings show that perceived procedural justice matters for notaries’ trust in the disciplinary jurisdiction of their cases. For example, those respondents who had been involved in a disciplinary case themselves, rated the disciplinary judge with a 5.3 on a 10-point scale when procedural justice was perceived by them to be relatively low. In contrast, when respondents who had been involved in a disciplinary case perceived procedural justice to be relatively high they rated the disciplinary judge with 7.6 on the same 10-point scale. This suggests that perceived procedural justice matters among an interesting type of professionals (notaries) who are involved in an interesting procedure in their profession (a disciplinary evaluation of their professional handling) in which important decisions are made. The current paper can contribute to the development of a barometer of notary disciplinary law.