5 5.1 Building trust in government Over-emphasis on confidence in systems Why does government in the Netherlands fail to pay sufficient attention to proper conduct in the field of implementation? Dutch politicians and policymakers place great emphasis on reliable systems: ‘confidence’ is central to our public administration. This is linked to the fact that politicians and administrators give higher priority to legislation and policymaking than to implementation. High quality implementation – implementation that revolves around individual citizens and the proper treatment of them – is generally regarded as less important. The National Ombudsman is daily confronted with the consequences of this in his work. This sense of priorities is connected with two different factors. The first is that politicians’ and policymakers’ main tools for the translation of policy are institutional, legal and financial. Incidents often prompt calls for new policy measures and authorities attempt to improve implementation by introducing new rules and regulations. Similarly, criticism in the political arena sometimes leads to stricter protocols for officials on the ground. This approach can work well, but it can also produce unwelcome or perverse side-effects. In many areas of policy, implementation is governed by such a plethora of rules, instructions and protocols that the primary process is actually impeded by them. This is at the expense of a proper relationship with the citizen. All this is increasingly true of the relationship between central and local government, where the main emphasis is now on financial frameworks, checks on lawfulness and accountability to individual ministries. Once again, this is a question of trust: to what extent do the central government ministries trust the municipalities? How much freedom do municipalities have to take decisions at local level? In this struggle for control, the parties often lose sight of the interests of the citizen.(26 ) The second factor is that, as experience shows, trust and proper conduct are regarded as less essential than institutional, financial and legal considerations. Since politicians, administrators and officials regard public satisfaction as a matter of secondary importance, implementation has a lower priority than policymaking. This means that ‘confidence’ is automatically stressed at the expense of ‘trust’. Building trust in government | 17 Pagina 16

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