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.

As a reaction to the perceived enforcement deficit of criminal law in the field of drug control, several countries implemented alternative regulatory strategies. One such strategy is the reregulating drugs, especially cannabis. Another strategy is the use of civil or administrative law to address drug-related crime. Especially the use of eviction to combat drug activities has become increasingly popular.
My PhD research focuses on these two developments within the field of drug control. More specifically, on the underlying rationales for the policies on recreational cannabis, the possibilities that international law provide to regulate recreational cannabis, the legal protection against drug-related evictions, and the explanation for the use of eviction to fight drug-related activities.