Books by Jeroen van der Heijden
Innovations in Urban Climate Governance: Voluntary Programs for Low-Carbon Buildings and Cities, 2017
Building on unique data, this book analyzes the efficacy of a prominent climate change mitigation... more Building on unique data, this book analyzes the efficacy of a prominent climate change mitigation strategy: voluntary programs for sustainable buildings and cities. It evaluates the performance of thirty-five voluntary programs from the global North and South, including certification programs, knowledge networks, and novel forms of financing. The author examines them through the lens of club theory, urban transformation theory, and diffusion of innovations theory. Using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) the book points out the opportunities and constraints of voluntary programs for decarbonizing the built environment, and argues for a transformation of their use in climate change mitigation. The book will appeal to readers interested in sustainable city planning, climate change mitigation, and voluntarism as an alternative governance mechanism for achieving socially and environmentally desirable outcomes. The wide diversity of cases from the global North and South generates new insights, and offers practical guidelines for designing effective programs.
Urban Climate Politics: Agency and Empowerment, 2019
Taken together, this volume constitutes a systematic mapping, exploration, and interrogation of t... more Taken together, this volume constitutes a systematic mapping, exploration, and interrogation of the nature of agency and empowerment in urban climate politics and action. It brings together contributions from scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds whose research focus on a variety of geographical areas and political positions. The breadth and depth of these contributions – theoretically, conceptually, empirically, and methodologically – speak to the driving questions outlined in the introduction to the book: who are the novel agents in urban climate governance; how are they empowered; and what is the empowering effect of increased agents and agency in urban climate governance? In this brief concluding chapter, we reflect on these contributions and synthesize the main arguments presented. This leads to key lessons on agency and empowerment in urban climate politics and opens up challenging perspectives for a future research agenda on these themes in the politics of urban climate futures.
Governance for Urban Sustainability and Resilience: Responding to Climate Change and the Role of the Built Environment, 2014
Cities, and the built environment more broadly, are key in the global response to climate change.... more Cities, and the built environment more broadly, are key in the global response to climate change. This groundbreaking book seeks to understand what governance tools are best suited for achieving cities that are less harmful to the natural environment, are less dependent on finite resources, and can better withstand human-made hazards and climate risks.
In mapping, describing and evaluating nearly 70 traditional and highly innovative governance tools from Asia, Australia, Europe and North America, Jeroen van der Heijden uncovers the five most eminent contemporary trends in governance for urban sustainability and resilience. He also develops a series of 12 design principles that will help to develop better governance tools for improving the sustainability and resilience of today's cities and those of the future. The book is unique in drawing lessons from the theoretical literature on environmental and hazard governance into a broad empirical study.
The book will be of great interest to scholars in the field of urban governance, urban planning, sustainable development and resilience, environmental and hazard governance, and climate risk adaptation and mitigation. It will also appeal to students, policymakers and organisations involved with environmental policy and governance.
Building regulatory enforcement regimes, 2009
"It is often assumed that traditional regulatory regimes centered on governmental action will ben... more "It is often assumed that traditional regulatory regimes centered on governmental action will benefit from greater private sector involvement. And, under the catchy phrase "from government to governance" globally a wide variety of hybrid forms of governance has emerged. However, little empirical insight exists in the actual effects of such hybridization. The author aims at filling up this knowledge gap.
He introduces a heuristic tool for comparative policy analysis, and applies this on a series of case studies.Following different building regulatory enforcement regimes in the Netherlands, Canada and Australia the author explains how different forms of private sector involvement play out in different settings.
The book contains a wealth of scholarly and applied findings. It is insightful in showing different regime types and in suggesting meaningful differences in implementation and potential effects. The book adds both to studies on regulation of the built environment and its enforcement, and to studies on governance reform."
Competitive Enforcement, 2008
"Globally the private sector is becoming increasingly involved in regulation and regulatory enfor... more "Globally the private sector is becoming increasingly involved in regulation and regulatory enforcement – often mutually competing or, as a sector, competing with traditional government departments. This book provides insight into this trend in a specific policy area: the built environment. Building on from general notions in regulatory literature, a methodical approach is introduced for comparative analysis of such privatization.
The book then continues by an in-depth analysis of building regulatory enforcement regimes in Australia. Here private sector involvement made its entry in the early 1990s as a competitive alternative to existing public sector involvement. Yet, each Australian State and Territory introduced a slightly different regime.
The differences amongst the regimes provide an unique opportunity to gain insight into how combinations of policy instruments produce diverse policy outcomes."
De voor- en nadelen van privatisering van het bouwtoezicht, 2009
Dit boek richt zich specifiek op de privatisering van het bouwtoezicht, met als doel inzicht te g... more Dit boek richt zich specifiek op de privatisering van het bouwtoezicht, met als doel inzicht te geven in de voor en nadelen hiervan. Het boek is een bewerking van een Engelstalig proefschrift waarop ik op 9 maart 2009 Cum Laude ben gepromoveerd aan de Technische Universiteit Delft. Het boek heeft echter ook een bredere relevantie.
Dit boek schrijf ik in een bijzondere tijdsspanne: er is sprake van een ingrijpende economische crisis. Terwijl ik dit boek schrijf, wordt de impact van deze crisis steeds minder duidelijk – wat wil zeggen: steeds groter, steeds uitgebreider. Het gevolg lijkt een veroordeling van marktwerking en een roep om meer overheidsingrijpen. Sterker, waar woorden als ‘zelfregulering’ en ‘privatisering’ tot voor kort te pas en te onpas werden genoemd als oplossing voor het overheidsfalen, lijken deze woorden opeens belast met een negatieve bijklank. Er is bijvoorbeeld veel kritiek over de (mogelijke) verkoop van Nederlandse energiebedrijven aan een Duitse organisatie en er begint kritiek te komen op de privatisering binnen de gezondheidszorg.
Een mogelijk gevolg van deze economische crisis en de kritiek op marktwerking is deprivatisering en een herintredende overheid. Wederom een begrijpelijk antwoord op de recente ervaringen van marktfalen. Echter, de huidige teneur getuigt van een kort geheugen. Gewaakt moet worden dat de huidige teneur leidt tot ontwikkelingen die in weer een volgende tijdspanne vragen om privatisering en minder overheidsbemoeienis. Dit boek is juist daarom geen pleidooi voor overheidsingrijpen of marktwerking. Ik probeer inzichtelijk te maken hoe bepaalde keuzes voor overheidsingrijpen, marktwerking, of een combinatie van beide uitpakken in de beleidspraktijk. Daarmee hoop ik een geheugensteun te leveren die bij kan dragen aan verbetering van publieke dienstverlening.
Papers by Jeroen van der Heijden
SAGE Open, 2022
Systems thinking has often been suggested (and sometimes been applied) to improve the development... more Systems thinking has often been suggested (and sometimes been applied) to improve the development and implementation of regulation ('regulatory governance'). But what are the pros and cons of this approach to regulatory governance? Following the logic of metaresearch, a systematic and replicable process of synthesizing research findings across a body of original research, this article presents an evidence synthesis of academic literature on systems thinking for and in regulatory governance. Through a staged approach, an initial body of 757 articles are analysed. The article presents the main findings from the evidence synthesis, presents the gaps in our knowledge, and suggests a future agenda for research on systems thinking for and in regulatory governance.
Regulation and Governance
Scholars of regulation have long engaged with behavioural oriented research to assess its value f... more Scholars of regulation have long engaged with behavioural oriented research to assess its value for regulatory theory and practice. This book review discusses two recent publications in this area: Nudge: The Final Edition by Richard Thaler and Cas Sunstein (2021) and The Behavioral Code: The Hidden Ways the Law Makes Us Better or Worse by Benjamin van Rooij and Adam Fine (2021).
Regulation and Governance
Following the traditional doctrine of the 'regulatory state', regulatory agencies should be given... more Following the traditional doctrine of the 'regulatory state', regulatory agencies should be given very focused mandates and stay away from the politicized realm of distributive policies and decisions. An opposing perspective would state that if regulatory agencies can contribute to economic redistribution, positive results such as network expansion, economies of scale and fiscal efficiency will ultimately lead to lower levels of regulatory failure. This article tests whether in countries of high socioeconomic inequality, such as Brazil, the active incorporation of distributive considerations by regulatory agencies leads to lower levels of failure. Through the analysis of the activities of seven Brazilian network regulatory agencies, the article develops theory-driven expectations and tests these expectations using crisp set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA). It concludes that not prioritizing redistribution is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for regulatory agencies' failure. In most types of failure, a lack of priority to redistribution leads to failure when combined with low regulatory capacity and low levels of formal independence.
European Journal of Risk Regulation
The scaling of urban climate action and its governance is rapidly becoming a central focus in the... more The scaling of urban climate action and its governance is rapidly becoming a central focus in the urban climate governance literature and policy debates. Building on the broader scaling literature, and inspired by related initiatives in other fields, this article calls for the development of a systematic "science of scaling" for urban climate governance. Such a science of scaling may help to give a better understanding of how well-performing urban climate action and its governance can be multiplied, accelerated and broadened (i.e., horizontal and vertical scaling, and scaling out, up and down), and it may help to uncover scaling trajectories towards systemic change in cities (i.e., deep scaling).
Urban Affairs Review, 2021
Cities are key in urban climate mitigation. Since the early 2000s, a trend of urban climate gover... more Cities are key in urban climate mitigation. Since the early 2000s, a trend of urban climate governance experimentation has been observed in which cities, and especially city governments, are trialling novel governance interventions, processes and instruments to learn from their development and implementation. This article explores the role of the government of the city of Seoul, South Korea, in a range of local experiments. It particularly focuses on the factors that contribute to the success (or lack thereof) of urban climate governance experimentation. It finds that the city's government has been successful in developing and trialling some but not all experiments and that the overall results of these are promising in certain areas of city development and use. The article also highlights some less promising results, indicating the fragile nature of urban climate governance experimentation-in both the scientific and political senses of the term.
Administration & Society, 2021
For many years, governments around the globe have been called on to increase the professionalism ... more For many years, governments around the globe have been called on to increase the professionalism of their public services. The New Zealand Government Regulatory Practice Initiative (G-REG) is an illustrative example of a network of government agencies responding to this call by providing a programme of standardised training for public servants. This article maps, explores, and interrogates this example to obtain a better understanding of whether a standardised programme can help to nurture and increase the professionalism of a community of public servants. It finds that the main challenge of such an undertaking is finding a balance between narrow professionalism (technical expertise and knowledge) and broad professionalism (acting proficiently and ethically).
State of the Art in Regulatory Governance Research Paper – 2021.09
In this research paper, the idea of Regulatory Stewardship is approached as a guiding philosophy ... more In this research paper, the idea of Regulatory Stewardship is approached as a guiding philosophy for regulatory reform and its development and current state is contrasted with other such guiding philosophies. Considering the complexities of regulation, regulators should look at the performance of their regulatory systems in full rather than at the performance of parts of it when pursuing regulatory reforms. Regulatory reforms have long been approached, unintentionally, as zero-sum games in which improvements of some parts of regulatory systems would ask for sacrifices of other parts—typically, increased cost-effectiveness has been traded off against reduced accountability, transparency, equity, or certainty. When looking at the performance of regulatory systems in full, regulators are forced to think about such trade-offs early on. Arguably, the Regulatory Stewardship experience in New Zealand illustrates that changing this mindset is possible despite many challenges.
State of the Art in Regulatory Governance Research Paper – 2021.10, 2021
Since the 1970s, Australian governments have sought to reduce regulatory burdens, particularly on... more Since the 1970s, Australian governments have sought to reduce regulatory burdens, particularly on business, subject regulation to rigorous cost-benefit analysis, and constrain both the stock and flow of new regulation. Yet however measured, regulation continues to grow, frequently in response to community demand. In this article we interrogate both the more extreme claims of the anti-regulation advocates and the alleged successes of anti-red tape initiatives, identifying a critical clash of values over the role of the state and the appropriate relationship between government, business and the community. We conclude by arguing that to deliver desirable societal, economic and democratic outcomes, we need to acknowledge regulation as an asset, professionalise its workforce and more actively assert its public value.
Global Environmental Politics, 2021
It is often thought that cities in the global South have less influence over climate city network... more It is often thought that cities in the global South have less influence over climate city networks than cities often from the global North. We question this by examining how different climate city networks relate and function as interconnected, yet independent, decision-making centers. We explore the extent to which this polycentric system overcomes the assumed exclusivity and inequality of these networks. We analyze 22 climate city networks using qualitative comparative analysis to classify the networks with a majority of members from either the global North or South based on conditions related to their context, diversity of members, and degree of homogeneity. We find that climate city networks overcome North-South dependencies through targeted support reflecting the local needs and conditions of city members. This diversity of tailored alternatives for cities provides equality and inclusivity at the polycentric system level, despite showing inequality and exclusivity at the network level.
Cities, 2022
In recent decades, climate city networks, understood as formalized subnational governance network... more In recent decades, climate city networks, understood as formalized subnational governance networks that have climate change as their focus, have emerged, linking cities to the global climate governance regime and helping them to take climate action locally. Such city networks are considered an essential aspect of urban climate policy and governance. Scholarship on climate city networks has illustrated that such networks can no longer be understood as homogenous groups of organizations; rather, they show heterogeneity in how they seek to attract and engage with member cities. In this article, we unpack this heterogeneity and interrogate the various ways in which climate city networks attract and engage with their members. We are particularly interested in understanding what typifies climate city networks with an active member base. In studying 22 real-world climate city networks, we uncover five distinct types of networks with an active member base. The typology illustrates the rich, but bounded, variety of climate city networks, and helps to clarify how climate city networks can be effective in encouraging their member cities to take local climate action.
Environmental Policy & Governance , 2021
Voluntary programmes provide city networks with a central link to their city members. These volun... more Voluntary programmes provide city networks with a central link to their city members. These voluntary programmes provide cities with benefits (e.g. knowledge, recognition, access to resources) if they meet the city network's programme requirements. This article seeks to understand how city networks make trade-offs between programme benefits and requirements to attract cities to the programmes they offer. We do so by analysing 55 voluntary programmes offered by 22 climaterelated city networks using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). We are particularly interested in the design of voluntary programmes that attract large numbers of participants. We find three main insights. First, programmes with a clear, single benefit are more attractive to city members than programmes with a broad range of benefits. Second, the combination of programme requirements and commitments allows city networks to target cohorts of cities based on their capacities and needs. Finally, cities are attracted to programmes that do not explicitly ask for direct results.
Sage Open, 2021
Governments around the world have begun to develop and implement risk governance and risk-based r... more Governments around the world have begun to develop and implement risk governance and risk-based regulation, and are often inspired by the insights from risk studies in doing so. Following these developments, scholars have begun to map, explore and interrogate risk governance models and strategies and risk-based regulatory approaches and instruments, and their performance. This article presents an evidence of academic literature on risk as an approach to regulatory governance. It follows the logic and applies tools of meta-research, a systematic and replicable process of synthesizing research findings across a body of original research. Following a staged approach, 135 peer-reviewed journal articles from an initial body of 1,125 articles were analysed. The article presents the main findings from the evidence synthesis, presents the gaps in our knowledge, and suggests a future agenda for research on risk as an approach to regulatory governance. The article finds that despite ongoing conceptual and normative debates about the need for risk governance and risk-based regulation, we lack a good understanding of how it operates in practice. Future scholarship is urged to be critical of the potential gap between academic and policy rhetoric on risk-based regulatory governance and the application of this approach to regulatory governance on the ground.
Policy and Society, 2021
When opportunity backfires: Exploring the implementation of urban climate governance alternatives... more When opportunity backfires: Exploring the implementation of urban climate governance alternatives in three major US cities Abstract Around the world, cities have committed themselves to urban climate action strategies with targets that go beyond those of their national governments. To implement their strategies, cities have embraced a range of alternative governance instruments and approaches ('governance alternatives'). While they have long been lauded by academics, policymakers, and practitioners for doing so, these 'frontrunner' cities are now being seen to struggle to achieve their ambitious targets when using governance alternatives. This article seeks to unpack and better understand this struggle by zooming in on the progress made in reducing (non-renewable) energy consumption in the built environment of three major cities in the United States (Chicago, New York, and San Francisco) over the last decade. Informed by interviews and supplementary data, the article uncovers a pattern across these three cities. In the early 2000s, they all set ambitious urban climate change targets, but lacked the power and capacity to achieve these. They all used a largely uncoordinated 'scattergun approach', embracing a broad set of (at best) modestly ambitious and (regularly) opportunistic governance alternatives to achieve the aims of their ambitious strategies. Whilst this approach allowed the cities to obtain quick initial results, the resulting fragmented configuration of traditional and alternative governance instruments and approaches now hinders them from meeting their targets.
Sustainable Development, 2021
Symbolic commitment is commonly acknowledged in the literature to be important for sustainability... more Symbolic commitment is commonly acknowledged in the literature to be important for sustainability governance. Academics express high hopes and expectations of symbolic commitment as a means to strengthen sustainability institutions. Policy makers and bureaucrats see it as being necessary in order to keep an issue on the agenda. However, little is known about how symbolic commitment contributes to institutional resilience. This study examines the rise and fall of national institutions for implementing sustainability agendas in Germany, Finland, and the UK in the context of fluctuating symbolic commitment. Interviews with 56 policy actors and documentary analysis uncovered the creative role of bureaucrats in securing symbolic commitment. The risks of relying on symbolic commitment can be reduced by considering the impact of economic austerity and the loss of institutional memory.
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Books by Jeroen van der Heijden
In mapping, describing and evaluating nearly 70 traditional and highly innovative governance tools from Asia, Australia, Europe and North America, Jeroen van der Heijden uncovers the five most eminent contemporary trends in governance for urban sustainability and resilience. He also develops a series of 12 design principles that will help to develop better governance tools for improving the sustainability and resilience of today's cities and those of the future. The book is unique in drawing lessons from the theoretical literature on environmental and hazard governance into a broad empirical study.
The book will be of great interest to scholars in the field of urban governance, urban planning, sustainable development and resilience, environmental and hazard governance, and climate risk adaptation and mitigation. It will also appeal to students, policymakers and organisations involved with environmental policy and governance.
He introduces a heuristic tool for comparative policy analysis, and applies this on a series of case studies.Following different building regulatory enforcement regimes in the Netherlands, Canada and Australia the author explains how different forms of private sector involvement play out in different settings.
The book contains a wealth of scholarly and applied findings. It is insightful in showing different regime types and in suggesting meaningful differences in implementation and potential effects. The book adds both to studies on regulation of the built environment and its enforcement, and to studies on governance reform."
The book then continues by an in-depth analysis of building regulatory enforcement regimes in Australia. Here private sector involvement made its entry in the early 1990s as a competitive alternative to existing public sector involvement. Yet, each Australian State and Territory introduced a slightly different regime.
The differences amongst the regimes provide an unique opportunity to gain insight into how combinations of policy instruments produce diverse policy outcomes."
Dit boek schrijf ik in een bijzondere tijdsspanne: er is sprake van een ingrijpende economische crisis. Terwijl ik dit boek schrijf, wordt de impact van deze crisis steeds minder duidelijk – wat wil zeggen: steeds groter, steeds uitgebreider. Het gevolg lijkt een veroordeling van marktwerking en een roep om meer overheidsingrijpen. Sterker, waar woorden als ‘zelfregulering’ en ‘privatisering’ tot voor kort te pas en te onpas werden genoemd als oplossing voor het overheidsfalen, lijken deze woorden opeens belast met een negatieve bijklank. Er is bijvoorbeeld veel kritiek over de (mogelijke) verkoop van Nederlandse energiebedrijven aan een Duitse organisatie en er begint kritiek te komen op de privatisering binnen de gezondheidszorg.
Een mogelijk gevolg van deze economische crisis en de kritiek op marktwerking is deprivatisering en een herintredende overheid. Wederom een begrijpelijk antwoord op de recente ervaringen van marktfalen. Echter, de huidige teneur getuigt van een kort geheugen. Gewaakt moet worden dat de huidige teneur leidt tot ontwikkelingen die in weer een volgende tijdspanne vragen om privatisering en minder overheidsbemoeienis. Dit boek is juist daarom geen pleidooi voor overheidsingrijpen of marktwerking. Ik probeer inzichtelijk te maken hoe bepaalde keuzes voor overheidsingrijpen, marktwerking, of een combinatie van beide uitpakken in de beleidspraktijk. Daarmee hoop ik een geheugensteun te leveren die bij kan dragen aan verbetering van publieke dienstverlening.
Papers by Jeroen van der Heijden
In mapping, describing and evaluating nearly 70 traditional and highly innovative governance tools from Asia, Australia, Europe and North America, Jeroen van der Heijden uncovers the five most eminent contemporary trends in governance for urban sustainability and resilience. He also develops a series of 12 design principles that will help to develop better governance tools for improving the sustainability and resilience of today's cities and those of the future. The book is unique in drawing lessons from the theoretical literature on environmental and hazard governance into a broad empirical study.
The book will be of great interest to scholars in the field of urban governance, urban planning, sustainable development and resilience, environmental and hazard governance, and climate risk adaptation and mitigation. It will also appeal to students, policymakers and organisations involved with environmental policy and governance.
He introduces a heuristic tool for comparative policy analysis, and applies this on a series of case studies.Following different building regulatory enforcement regimes in the Netherlands, Canada and Australia the author explains how different forms of private sector involvement play out in different settings.
The book contains a wealth of scholarly and applied findings. It is insightful in showing different regime types and in suggesting meaningful differences in implementation and potential effects. The book adds both to studies on regulation of the built environment and its enforcement, and to studies on governance reform."
The book then continues by an in-depth analysis of building regulatory enforcement regimes in Australia. Here private sector involvement made its entry in the early 1990s as a competitive alternative to existing public sector involvement. Yet, each Australian State and Territory introduced a slightly different regime.
The differences amongst the regimes provide an unique opportunity to gain insight into how combinations of policy instruments produce diverse policy outcomes."
Dit boek schrijf ik in een bijzondere tijdsspanne: er is sprake van een ingrijpende economische crisis. Terwijl ik dit boek schrijf, wordt de impact van deze crisis steeds minder duidelijk – wat wil zeggen: steeds groter, steeds uitgebreider. Het gevolg lijkt een veroordeling van marktwerking en een roep om meer overheidsingrijpen. Sterker, waar woorden als ‘zelfregulering’ en ‘privatisering’ tot voor kort te pas en te onpas werden genoemd als oplossing voor het overheidsfalen, lijken deze woorden opeens belast met een negatieve bijklank. Er is bijvoorbeeld veel kritiek over de (mogelijke) verkoop van Nederlandse energiebedrijven aan een Duitse organisatie en er begint kritiek te komen op de privatisering binnen de gezondheidszorg.
Een mogelijk gevolg van deze economische crisis en de kritiek op marktwerking is deprivatisering en een herintredende overheid. Wederom een begrijpelijk antwoord op de recente ervaringen van marktfalen. Echter, de huidige teneur getuigt van een kort geheugen. Gewaakt moet worden dat de huidige teneur leidt tot ontwikkelingen die in weer een volgende tijdspanne vragen om privatisering en minder overheidsbemoeienis. Dit boek is juist daarom geen pleidooi voor overheidsingrijpen of marktwerking. Ik probeer inzichtelijk te maken hoe bepaalde keuzes voor overheidsingrijpen, marktwerking, of een combinatie van beide uitpakken in de beleidspraktijk. Daarmee hoop ik een geheugensteun te leveren die bij kan dragen aan verbetering van publieke dienstverlening.