PhD defence H.B. (Babs) Broekema

Dissertation in short:

Following a major decentralisation in 2015, Dutch municipalities became responsible for three social policy domains: youth care, care for chronically ill and elderly, and employment and income. As such, municipalities are no longer merely considered an alternative place for governments to deliver decentralised welfare services, but are considered an independent layer of policy development, with political, administrative, and financial responsibilities. These responsibilities, combined with the policy discretion they bring, have the potential to lead to policy divergence between municipalities.

To find out how the dynamics of the local political arena contribute to variation in constellations of local social policy, the central research problem is formulated as follows: How do key stakeholders in local political arenas shape decentralised social policies?

The main conclusion is that local politicians and policymakers balance between local political contexts and multilevel institutional pressures. Local administrators and civil servants try to adapt policy to the local political context. However, they are limited by limited resources and/or are part of regional partnerships in which agreements have been made about the joint design of local social policy. In addition, the strength of the multilevel institutional pressures leads to a limited degree of variation. The local circumstances that we included in the study play only a minor role in this regard. As a result, the argument that “the transfer of a large number of tasks from the central government to municipalities allows for local tailoring and customisation, and allows for stronger citizen involvement”, turns out to be difficult to implement in practice.