دانلود کتاب حکمرانی مناقشه‌برانگیز: دولت‌های محلی، کنشگران و سیاست‌های ملی بحث‌برانگیز

The initial idea for this book emerged from a reconsideration of my PhD thesis which I defended in the late spring of 2009. After leaving the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), to work as a postdoctoral researcher in the Sociology Department at the University of Amsterdam, I had a conversation with Jan Willem Duyvendak, who had served on my doctoral committee. I asked him if there were elements in my thesis that had been overlooked. Jan Willem pointed out that my analysis placed too much emphasis on conflict from the perspectives of the national cabinet, municipal players, citizen action groups and the media, instead of looking at some of their interactions. And he was right. My thesis focused on the conflict surrounding the municipal amalgamation of the city of The Hague and its vicinity in The Netherlands, as a dichotomous analysis of citizens opposing government. What I had missed, was the multilevel governance dynamics between the cabinet and the municipal players and I overlooked the collaborative interactions between the municipal players and citizen action groups. After reviewing my empirical materials, I worked on new ideas with Jan Willem on what we called at that time ‘governmental activism’, from which we published an article in Social Movement Studies. In the same period, I collaborated with Christian Bröer in a contribution to a collected volume edited by Jan Willem Duyvendak and James Jasper. Our chapter conceptualised contentious governance and local government players as social movement actors. After presenting several conference papers that followed the same theme, it became clear to me that social movement scholars were resistant to the notion of government players as activists, essentially arguing that government players will never behave as activists, even if they oppose policies by other government players. My emphasis shifted after a conversation with Conny Roggeband that turned out to be a pivotal moment in the development of this book. She suggested dropping the concept of governmental activism and further develop the concept of contentious governance. Thus, by analysing the complex contentious dynamics between (supra)national government players, subnational government players and activists, I understood how social movement and public policy scholarship could be in conversation with each other. After finding several appropriate cases the project became my labour of love and diligently occupied the time between teaching and working on other research projects. To maintain the momentum, I colla-borated with several inspiring scholars to produce articles on contentious governance and related topics. These collaborations helped me further develop my ideas, and the interest in this work confirmed my belief that a full book would be a worthy contribution to a nascent scholarship. The publication of this book fills me not only with great pride and joy, but also recognition and gratitude for the shoulders of the many people that I stand on, and who have contributed in various ways to this work. I would like to extend a big thank you to every politician, civil servant and activist who shared their experiences and assessments with me during the interviews. In addition, this book also benefited from newspaper analysis and the analysis of copious policy documents. I want to express my grat-itude to Rik Braams, Hester de Gooijer, Jesse Evers, Jonas Jeunink, Nina Salomons, and Lucas van Straalen, who helped me as student assistants to gather and navigate a path through the vast amounts of newspaper articles and policy documents that the cases generated.