PhD defence R.A. (Rowie) Huijbregts

Dissertation in short:

The housing shortage, energy transition and refugee crisis: urgent challenges that take place in society. ‘Place’ in literal sense: adding houses, installing windmills, and receiving refugees requires physical space in our built environment. Public sector professionals therefore decide on the deployment of real estate – buildings, land, infrastructure, water. In doing so, they continuously assess public values that underlie decision-making. Yet, we know little about how public professionals deal with this in practice: How do politicians, policymakers and implementers actually engage with values assessment in their work? What does that imply for society?

In this dissertation, Rowie Huijbregts introduces a framework to better understand the assessment of public values and its effects, entitled ‘Public Values Assessment as Practice’. Following questions from the Dutch Central Government Real Estate Agency, Huijbregts subsequently investigates empirically what values assessment entails in the public real estate domain. What struggles do professionals working at a public real estate agency experience when assessing public values? When are they actually satisfied the assessment of values for a real estate issue? How responsive are politicians to such assessments in decision-making about real estate objects? 

This dissertation concludes there is no one-size-fits-all approach to values assessment: public professionals deploy different configurations of activities in this respect, based on the government setting and issues – context – in which and on which they work. This, in turn, has various consequences for political decision-making, policymaking and implementation: this dissertation shows that the safeguarding of public values that have been made explicit is not automatically guaranteed.