Social policy in Dutch urban neighborhoods
A quest for collaboration
Dutch social policy revolves around a quest for collaboration between local government, citizens, and social professionals. National and local policies promise to work in ‘closeness to citizens’ and to tackle social issues ‘with, for and by residents’. Simultaneously, policy actors focus on urban neighborhoods where unemployment, housing problems and language deficiencies influence the daily lives of residents. These policy promises suggest a shift from vertical to horizontal relationships between government and citizens, but how does this play out in urban environments characterized by social inequality and racialized relations?
Based on this tension, I delve into the neighborhood to investigate how ‘municipality’ and ‘neighborhood’ come together in social policy making and policy implementation processes. I ask who represents ‘municipality’ or ‘neighborhood’, and how roles and responsibilities are negotiated and contested.
In this context, the idea of ‘community’ plays a crucial role. The collaboration with local communities is based on a certain imagination of what a ‘community’ should be. The quest for collaboration goes hand in hand with the desire to strengthen, or even create, communities that fit the local policy vision. At the same time, other communities are being problematized because they do not adhere to the desired character. In my research I investigate which communities are desirable and undesirable in the search for cooperation between state actors and citizens, and what kind of impact this has on local relations and how this shapes new, more horizontal state-citizen relations.