The Dissociated Trias — Statecraft

§ 1 · A council meeting that could have taken place anywhere

On a Tuesday evening in a municipality of 110,000 inhabitants the council adopted the Strategic Vision for the Social Domain 2025-2029. The document ran to fifty-nine pages and had been prepared in a so-called broad societal dialogue that preceded the vision itself. The alderman thanked the residents who had thought along. The parties appreciated the document in the order of coalition and opposition. One councillor from a local party asked a question about the position of informal carers. The amendment that followed added a sentence to section four about recognition of informal care. The amendment was adopted unanimously. After an hour and a half the vision was adopted.

Whoever laid the document the next morning beside the visions of six other mid-sized municipalities would find the same text in almost the same formulations. The resident is central. We work in an integrated and cross-domain way. Prevention and early signalling strengthen the social base. Close by, independent-minded and effective. Participating for life. Own strength where it can, support where it must. The passages on youth are paraphrases of the Youth Reform Agenda. The passages on social support are paraphrases of the Ministry of Health Future Agenda. The passages on participation follow the Broad Offensive and the outlines of the Participation Act reform. The passages on subsistence security lean on the interdepartmental review on simplifying income support and on the monitoring of the Netherlands Institute for Social Research. What the municipality itself brings in is at the margin of the margin.

A councillor who observes this can think two things. The first thought is that the document is good, because it aligns with the national frameworks and the scientific state of the art. The second thought is that the document leaves the council nothing to choose, because all substantive directions have already been fixed elsewhere. Both thoughts are true. The problem is that they are not experienced as a problem, because the council recognises the pattern as how it is supposed to be.

This paper analyses that pattern at the level where it arises. Not as a local problem of weak framework-setting or of councils looking away, but as the outcome of a role reversal in the Dutch trias politica. A role reversal that the Constitution does not recognise, that no legislator decided, and that no one undoes because it has been built up over seven decades along many small steps. What the document on the council table shows is no failing council. It is a council asked to give form to content it does not decide.

§ 2 · The dissociative lens, one level higher

In the three earlier Statecraft series the dissociative lens has been worked out for organisations (Series I), for the reverberation of those organisations on citizens and social fabrics (Series II) and for the cognitive patterns by which dissociation keeps itself in place (Series III). What is addressed in this closing paper is that the same lens also applies to the constitutional architecture of the state. What in an executive organisation is called decoupling from intent is, at the constitutional level, decoupling from function. What in an organisation was called form-laundering, the repackaging of contentless processes in legitimate forms, is at the highest level the council meeting that sets frameworks it does not decide.

The thesis of this paper is that the Dutch trias has reconfigured itself without being redesigned. The Constitution describes a tripartite division: legislative power (government and the States General together), executive power (government and administrative bodies), and judicial power. This division has remained essentially unchanged since 1848. The upper house is a chamber of reflection, the lower house is a co-legislator, the cabinet executes, the municipality is autonomous with supplementary co-governance tasks, and the court tests.

Empirically almost nothing of this description still holds. The upper house functions not as a chamber of reflection but as a political brake. The lower house functions not as a co-legislator but as a body of reflection and judgement, with a motion-to-amendment ratio that has shifted in fifteen years from six-to-one to above twenty-to-one.¹ The cabinet fulfils the actual legislative function via departmental legislative directorates. The municipalities and the joint arrangements have become the actual executive power, but additionally bear a quasi-norm-setting load that the Constitution ascribes to the council as a framework-setting body without supplying it with the material the framework is about. The court has accepted a norm-forming function not provided for in the Constitution, as witness Urgenda and the three Box 3 judgments.² And Brussels holds primacy over a growing part of substantive law, without a Dutch body bearing the full weight of that reality in its place in the system.

Six recipients of constitutional function where three were arranged. The architecture has not been revised, only filled from a logic other than the one for which it was intended.

§ 3 · What family-trauma research teaches about role reversal

In the literature on family systems under pressure, role reversal is a recognised but, in its workings, underestimated phenomenon. When parents, through addiction, illness, depression, conflict or other structural incapacity, can no longer fulfil their parental function, a child often takes that function over. The child does the shopping, comforts the grieving parent, mediates between siblings, conducts conversations with agencies. Boszormenyi-Nagy described this in 1973 under the term parentification; Jurkovic worked it out in Lost Childhoods (1997).³ The diagnostic core of the pattern is not that the child takes on tasks that are too heavy. That could be resolved with good support. The core is that the role reversal within the family is experienced as normal. No one names it. No one corrects it. The child feels valued for what it carries and does not know how a family would look otherwise. The parent feels relieved and goes on functioning without visible incapacity. From outside the family looks competent. An outsider who looks at the outcomes sees mainly what goes well.

The price is that the architecture is structurally disturbed. The child develops a chronic responsibility orientation that returns in adult relationships. The parent unlearns parental action and can no longer retrieve it later. The system works, but its working depends on a distribution of roles that inverts the original functions. Under stress such a system becomes dislocated, because the actual parent cannot intervene at the crucial moment.

An organisation or a state is not a family. The analogy has methodological limits that the psychiatric literature knows and that are not glossed over in this paper. But one line is transferable, and it is diagnostically useful for Dutch public administration. When an institutional system under prolonged pressure cannot bear the original distribution of roles, no open crisis of collapse arises. A role reversal arises that behaves as the new normality. What the Constitution ascribes to the council is no longer done by the council, but the council continues to perform the ritual. What the Constitution ascribes to the legislator is still done by the legislator in the formal sense, but the actual norm-formation has shifted to the department. What the Constitution ascribes to the cabinet as executive power is largely executed by co-governments described in the same provision as independent administrative bodies.

The role reversal is, in the terms this series uses, dissociated. Not because it is hidden, but because it is not felt as a deviation. The system reproduces itself in the inversion as if the inversion were the original form.

§ 4 · Article 124 and the original balance

Article 124 of the Constitution is remarkably balanced in its wording. The first paragraph provides that for provinces and municipalities the power of regulation and administration concerning their own household is left to their boards. The second paragraph provides that regulation and administration can be required by or pursuant to statute. It is the same provision that regulates both autonomy and co-governance. The order is not accidental: autonomy comes first, co-governance is the possibility of statutory requirement.

Whoever follows the constitutional history of the Kingdom sees that this order was reflected in practice for decades. The municipality was, in the Thorbeckean tradition, primarily responsible for what concerned its own household: local roads, local policing until 1993, local taxes, public order, housing, market regulations, school buildings, sewerage, drinking-water provision in so far as locally organised. Co-governance was real but demarcated: the execution of statutory tasks that the central state did not wish or was unable to execute itself, with a reimbursement directed at execution and with the retention of substantial policy freedom at the municipal margin.

Between 1955 and 2025 that balance shifted systematically. Not through one great system change, but through an accumulation of decentralisations, framework acts and implementing acts, each of which was defensible on its own and which in their sum changed the relationship between autonomy and co-governance beyond recognition. The National Assistance Act 1965 and its successors up to the Participation Act 2015. The General Assistance Act 1996. The Disability Provisions Act 1994. The Social Support Act 2007. The three decentralisations of 2015: the Youth Act, the Social Support Act 2015, the Participation Act. The Environment and Planning Act 2024. The Climate Agreement with the Regional Energy Strategies since 2019. The Youth Reform Agenda 2023. The Ministry of Health Future Agenda. Each of them co-governance, and each presented as a strengthening of municipal responsibility.

A rough estimate at the level of expenditure gives the order of magnitude. Of the roughly 80 billion euros that municipalities spent in 2024, an estimated eighty to eighty-five per cent concerns the execution of central-government policy in co-governance, with within that a margin for local elaboration that varies per scheme.⁴ The purely autonomous municipal household, in the Thorbeckean sense, has been reduced to a minority share of the budget: public green space, sport, culture, local events, part of the physical living environment, local levies. The rest is the execution of what has been decided above the municipality, with a margin of freedom that relates to the main body as the icing relates to the cake.

The European Charter of Local Self-Government of 1985 requires in Article 9 that the financial resources of decentralised governments be commensurate with their powers. The Netherlands has ratified this charter, but made a reservation to Article 11 on legal remedies for local governments. What is intended in the Charter as a basis for local autonomy cannot be put by a Dutch municipality to the administrative court in a dispute with the central state.⁵ The legal asymmetry sits precisely where the actual dependency is strongest.

§ 5 · The framework-setting function as ritual

The municipal council has three functions in the usual administrative-science typology: representing, framework-setting, controlling. Since the dualisation of 2002 these functions are explicit, and since 2015 they have been put forward by all administrative-science handbooks as the core of local democratic work. What has empirically happened is that the framework-setting function has, in the co-governance domains, withdrawn into a ritual that looks high-quality in itself and in fact chooses little.

A first glance at the material suffices to see the patterns. A random sample of ten strategic visions for the social domain, adopted by ten different municipalities in 2023 and 2024, yields the same structure: an introduction about the times we live in, an analysis naming demographic development, ageing, more complex problems and subsistence security, a normative part with prevention, own strength, integration and cross-domain working, a chapter on partnership with residents, a chapter on data and steering, and an implementation agenda in which the actual choices are pushed through to the executive board.

The passages are not identical, but the overlap is striking. The type of document that in 2008 was still interchangeable in the degree to which it looked ambitious is in 2024 interchangeable in the degree to which it looks worked-out. What distinguishes it is the quality of the drafting, not the choice underlying it.

A councillor who tries to choose discovers that the room for choice has been walled up at several levels. At the statutory level the Youth Act, the Social Support Act 2015, the Participation Act and the Environment and Planning Act have fixed the main directions. At the policy level the Youth Reform Agenda, the Ministry of Health Future Agenda, the interdepartmental review on income support and the Subsistence Security Approach supply the operational frameworks. At the procurement and funding level the youth regions, the social-support providers and the sheltered-employment companies have contracts whose term is shorter than a council period but whose renewal comes down to muddling. At the execution level the area teams have built up their working routines at a pace that outstrips the change of framework. What remains as framework-setting work is the adoption of the text in which all these data are wrapped.

That explains why the textual emptiness between municipalities is so striking. A vision cannot be substantively different if the substance has been determined elsewhere. The document can only differ in tone: sober or inspiring, thin or eloquent, businesslike or empathetic. The choice at the margin becomes the real choice, and the main choice is passed unnamed to the executive organisation and to the provider. In the terms of the change colours, framework-setting has become structurally blue and planning-based, with a thin veneer of red to give the rhetoric humanity, while the actual yellow movement, the redistribution of power between central state and municipality, comes up in no council decision.

In an interim assignment in a municipality of around 95,000 inhabitants, for the social-domain cluster, I witnessed in 2018 a council that worked for six weeks on a new Strategic Youth Vision. The administrative organisation produced three versions, the executive board amended them quietly along the wishes of the coalition, and the council spent the evening of adoption on small changes to the section on whom the municipality was primarily there for. The amendment that succeeded added that the young people themselves would be heard in the execution. The choices that would have changed the work substantively had to do with the arrangement of access, the position of the general practitioner in the referral route, and the question of whether the municipality would build up its own procurement capacity or leave it to the youth region. None of these three choices was in the vision, because a vision that touched on these three choices can no longer be called a vision. The vision was adopted. Procurement stayed with the youth region. Access remained untouched. The GP route remained intact. Three years later the municipality wrote a new vision, with a new core group of residents, a new editor, and a comparable outcome.

This is no reproach to the council. It is a diagnosis of the architecture in which the council operates. The framework-setting is dissociated: the form is performed, the substance is determined elsewhere, and no one names the difference between the two.

§ 6 · The joint arrangement as a compensatory hybrid

A state that imposes on its co-governments the execution of central-government policy without the scale of the individual co-government being able to bear that execution predictably develops intermediate layers to bridge the difference in scale. In the Netherlands that has become the joint arrangement. In number, in volume and in function, the joint arrangement is a shadow government that the Constitution does not know.

The figures show this. The joint-arrangements register on overheid.nl contains in 2025 around 438 joint arrangements in four statutory forms: public body, operational-management organisation, joint body, and bare arrangement.⁶ The average Dutch municipality takes part in around twenty-seven cooperative arrangements; municipalities above a hundred thousand inhabitants in more than thirty.⁷ In financial terms, around 13.2 billion euros went through joint arrangements in 2024, alongside volumes via centre-municipality constructions and cooperation agreements that are included in no authoritative count.⁸ An alderman in a municipality of fifty thousand inhabitants is structurally a board member of a safety region, a municipal health service, an environmental agency, a tax-collection partnership, a sheltered-employment company, an ICT cooperative, an employment enterprise and a youth region.

The Act on Strengthening the Democratic Legitimacy of Joint Arrangements, in force since 1 July 2022, adds to this picture the characteristic pattern: instead of asking the structural question of why eight to ten legal persons per municipality make sense at all, the legislator adds extra safeguards within the existing system. A citizen-participation paragraph in every arrangement, a more extensive consultation procedure, an obligation to evaluate. The paper control is raised, the actual problem remains. The Council of State doubted, in its advice on the bill, whether the instruments would make a substantial contribution.⁹ In the lower-house debate Renske Leijten put it more sharply than most lawyers: no one in the chamber expected the democratic deficit to disappear.¹⁰ No one expected it, no one stopped the procedure that continues to act on democracy’s behalf.

That is precisely the working of the pattern. The joint arrangement is no solution to the scale problem created by co-governance. The joint arrangement is a compensatory hybrid that absorbs the scale problem without naming it. For the council it means that the part of the municipal budget that escapes its direct steering grows in two directions at once: upward, because the central state nails the material down, and sideways, because execution has been moved to joint arrangements where the council can submit views but cannot take a decision. The framework-setting function is scooped empty on both flanks. On the flank of substantive policy because the content is determined elsewhere. On the flank of execution because the organisation stands elsewhere.

For the municipal chief executive and the social-domain director who operate in this architecture, this is no abstraction. It is their daily working environment. They execute what others have decided, they finance what others have budgeted, they are answerable for results over which their council can set no real frameworks. That they do this with integrity and with good outcomes for a considerable part of their work is no counter-argument. It is an indication of the strength of the executive apparatus that, in a dissociated architecture, still delivers public value. Dutch execution works, in a distribution of roles that should not exist.

§ 7 · From substance to form: how far can the central state enter execution?

The joint arrangement as described in §6 was for a long time a voluntary hybrid. Municipalities decided themselves, on the basis of the Joint Arrangements Act (Wgr), to cooperate with neighbouring municipalities in fields where the individual scale fell short. The choice to cooperate, the choice of partner, the choice of legal form and the choice of the package of tasks lay, albeit within frameworks, with the councils themselves. What has been set in motion since the second half of 2025 in the field of youth care is a different type of movement. The central state no longer only prescribes what the municipality must do, but fixes how the municipality must organise itself for it, with which partners, in which geographical arrangement, along which vision-formation and under which external supervision. The voluntary hybrid thereby becomes a compulsory hybrid, and the question shifts from the substance of co-governance to the form of execution. How far can the central state enter execution and form before Article 124 of the Constitution is empirically empty?

The Act on Improving the Availability of Youth Care, accepted by the upper house on 7 October 2025 and largely in force from 1 January 2026, illustrates the pattern fully.¹¹ Article 2.18 of the Youth Act obliges municipalities, with effect from 1 January 2027, to cooperate regionally via a joint arrangement, the Youth Region. Municipalities can choose between three statutory forms of the Wgr, public body, centre municipality or operational-management organisation, but they cannot choose not to cooperate. The regional division is no longer a choice of the participating municipalities, but is fixed by order in council, the Decree on Improving the Availability of Youth Care.¹² Which forms of specialist youth care are procured regionally is likewise determined by order in council. Within that, individual municipalities may not apply different contract or subsidy conditions. The Youth Region gets its own budget, its own contracting mandate and its own accountability cycle.

The same act obliges the municipalities in each region to draw up a regional vision. The explanatory memorandum offers the possibility of placing the task of drawing up the regional vision with the Youth Region, that is, away from the councils that are formally the framework-setting body. The subjects that must at least be included in the regional vision are prescribed by order in council. The document described earlier in this paper as a type, a vision whose substance is determined elsewhere and whose text is interchangeable between municipalities, here gets its most literal statutory anchoring: a vision that must be adopted by the councils, on the basis of order-in-council subjects, in a Youth Region form whose composition and package of tasks likewise lie in an order in council. Framework-setting as ritual is now a statutory obligation.

In the same act the Dutch Healthcare Authority is designated as supervisor of the system. From 1 January 2026 the Authority conducts system research and early signalling of risks to the availability of specialist youth care; from 1 January 2027 supervision of financial management and the public annual accountability of providers is added.¹³ With that, supervision of the execution of the social domain shifts from the municipal council and the administrative layers designated for it in the decentralised architecture, to a central national supervisory body that built up its field of work in the care market. The Youth Act, decentralised in 2015 under the banner that close-by is better, is eleven years later statutorily monitored by a central supervisor from Utrecht.

Alongside the availability act runs the Scope of the Youth Act bill, which was in internet consultation in the first half of 2026. The proposal obliges every municipality to set up a sturdy local team, to be fixed in both the Youth Act and the Social Support Act 2015, with tasks defined in the act: low-threshold information and advice, clarification of need, basic youth care and general provisions, and referral to additional youth care.¹⁴ A Sturdy Local Teams covenant, signed in March 2026 by the Association of Netherlands Municipalities, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education and seven parties from the field, gives the substantive elaboration. What in 2015 was room for local elaboration becomes in 2026 a statutory and covenant obligation with nationally uniform content. The proposal’s ambition, reducing the share of young people in youth care from one in seven to one in ten by 2028, expresses the degree to which the central state binds itself again to execution after a decentralisation whose execution consequences did not lie with the central state.

The pattern is not confined to the social domain. In the spatial domain the Environment and Planning Act, in force since 1 January 2024, has made compulsory a Digital System for the Environment and Planning Act (DSO) on which all municipal environment plans, permit applications, rules and decisions must be disclosed. Not only the substance of spatial law is centrally determined, but also the channel through which municipalities communicate with citizens and applicants. A municipality that wished to arrange its own work processes differently can do so only in so far as the DSO permits the arrangement. The central state here enters not only legislation and organisational form, but the operational infrastructure down to the level of the software chain.

Whoever lays these three developments side by side sees a new pattern. The co-governance route described in §4 was substantive: the central state determined what. The route of the availability act, the Scope bill and the DSO is structural: the central state determines what, how, with whom, in which form, along which vision-formation, with which supervision and on which software chain. The municipal autonomy of which Article 124 of the Constitution speaks no longer shrinks only on substance, but on the organisational and infrastructural working base within which that substance could be filled in. The margin within which a council could set frameworks decreases in the same degree as the statutory prescriptions increase that define the margin itself.

A municipal chief executive who in 2026 prepares the social-domain framework letter for the executive board finds a working environment in which the fundamental arrangement choices for youth care, local teams, regional vision, contracting conditions, supervisory bodies, and in the spatial domain for plan publication and the permit route, are all fixed by statute or order in council. What there is to decide is how the work is concretely organised within those frameworks, with which providers, with which area teams, in which procurement rhythm. That is real work and it can make a real difference in execution quality. But it is no framework-setting in the constitutional sense of the word. It is operational work within a statutorily nailed-down framework, followed by a vision adoption whose subjects have already been listed by an order in council.

The question all this raises is whether the Constitution, in Article 124’s present wording, still describes what the Dutch state does. The second paragraph provides that regulation and administration can be required by or pursuant to statute. That word required presupposes a demarcation: co-governance is a call on the municipality, not a takeover of its arrangement. When a statute compulsorily imposes the cooperation form, fixes the regional division by order in council, prescribes the vision substantively, designates the supervisor centrally, makes the software chain compulsory and fills in the local team’s package of tasks in detail, then it is no longer plausible to describe the result as municipal autonomy supplemented by co-governance. It is, in function and in form, the decentralised execution of central-government policy by executive organisations formally called municipalities. What the Constitution says about it has not changed since 1983. What practice does is written on another page.

§ 8 · The other five axes, in brief

What is worked out in this paper for the co-governance axis applies mutatis mutandis to the other axes of the dissociated trias. This paper sketches them in brief; later papers in this series or a possible bundling can work each out in the detail it deserves.

The cabinet as actual legislator. Substantive norm-formation has shifted from parliament to the departmental legislative directorates. A random reference date shows that the percentage of bills adopted without amendment has risen, and that the duration of the amendment process has shortened. The substantive preparation takes place predominantly at the department. The legislator in the Constitution (government and States General together) is in practice the cabinet with a parliament that ratifies.

The lower house as a body of reflection and judgement. The motion-to-amendment ratio, which around 2010 stood at six-to-one, had risen above twenty-to-one by 2024. The house does more on visibility and judgement-formation, and less on co-legislation. What is documented in The Dissociated Legislator (Statecraft, April 2026) forms the centre of gravity on this axis: an organisation that has exchanged its original function for a function that does not describe its constitutional position.

The upper house as a political brake. The upper house no longer functions as a chamber of reflection, but as a political brake in which coalition arithmetic becomes decisive for statutes the lower house has already accepted. The rejections in 2024 can be projected onto party lines with a precision that contradicts the original function of the Senate.

The court as norm-former. Urgenda (Supreme Court 2019), the three Box 3 judgments (Supreme Court 2021, 2024) and the Harderwijk ruling (Administrative Jurisdiction Division 2022) are each defensible on their own and jointly illustrative: the court has accepted a norm-forming function not provided for in the Constitution, because the legislator no longer fulfils its function with the same sharpness. That is no activist court. It is a court that fills the vacuum.

Brussels as substantive co-legislator. A growing part of Dutch substantive law has its primacy in Brussels: competition, environment, agriculture, financial markets, data protection, digital services, and since Next Generation EU also substantial parts of investment policy. The Dutch body that takes this law into its own function is, in the formal sense, the lower house, in practice the cabinet via the COREPER route, in execution the executive organisation. Democratic anchoring is missing at all three levels.

Six recipients. Three functions. The role reversal is not asymmetrical on one axis; it is structural.

§ 9 · The Strategic Triangle, at the level of the architecture

Mark Moore’s Strategic Triangle asks where the tension sits between public value, operational capacity and political legitimacy.¹⁵ Applied to the Dutch trias in its dissociated mode, a threefold pattern emerges.

On the corner of public value the formal ambition is unchanged. The Constitution has not been essentially changed since 1983 in its provisions on legislation, execution and local government. Every relevant actor endorses the original functions. No academic, administrator or judge would assert that the council should no longer set frameworks, that the lower house should no longer make law, or that the municipality should not decide on its own household.

On the corner of operational capacity the picture is reversed. Every administrative layer has built up operational capacity within its actual function. The legislative directorate delivers statute, the upper house delivers ratification or brake-handling, the lower house delivers motions and judgements, the council delivers visions and by-laws, the municipality delivers execution, the joint arrangement delivers specialist capacity, the court delivers norm-formation. What is missing is operational capacity for the original functions to which the Constitution refers. A municipality that wished to rediscover what local autonomy means in a field of substantial financial weight has not the capacity to claim or conquer that space. The staff, the thinking and the budget are all arranged for the execution of co-governance.

On the corner of political legitimacy the tension is sharpest. Every actor in this system derives its political legitimacy from a function it does not primarily fulfil. The council derives legitimacy from framework-setting, while it works predominantly as a ratifier. The cabinet derives legitimacy from execution, while it predominantly legislates. The lower house derives legitimacy from co-legislation, while it predominantly reflects. The system as a whole derives legitimacy from a constitutional architecture that no longer describes its empirical working. That is a legitimacy that can recalibrate itself structurally at no point, because recalibration would have to name the dissociated mode, and the mode withdraws precisely by being named.

The Strategic Triangle points here not to a corner that is missing. It points to a geometry that as a whole does not close. What was diagnosed in Series I for organisations as the dissociated mode is, at the constitutional level, the same geometry: three corners each lying in their own plane, a triangle that no longer functions as a triangle.

§ 10 · Embedding and the action perspective

It is not productive to end this paper with a revolutionary sketch. A constitutional revision that makes the actual distribution of roles explicit, a reorganisation of domestic government on the Danish model, a strengthening of the council by amending the Wgr and the Financial Relations Act: these are all proposals defensible in principle and discussed since 1983 without taking shape. Repeating those proposals is, within Statecraft, an expression of what was named in Series III as word continuity without continuity of meaning: the same formulations as forty years ago, with the same outcome.

What this paper can deliver is an action perspective that connects to the position of senior professionals in this system: municipal chief executives, corporate directors, regional-cooperation programme managers, members of the boards of joint arrangements, senior civil servants with executive responsibility. Four action perspectives connect to the central thesis of this paper.

The first action perspective is to name what the council does and what the council does not do. A municipal chief executive who prepares the council documents can choose to make explicit, in the covering note, which part of the vision or policy framework is a municipal choice and which part is an elaboration of central-government or EU law. This sounds simple and is in practice difficult, because it confronts the council with the real room for choice. The effect is that the council’s time focuses on what the council can actually choose, and that the other passages are treated as what they are: technical ratification of overlying frameworks. The ritual does not disappear, but it shifts from performance to transaction.

The second action perspective is embedding as a test at every framework-setting. A vision that will still be recognisable in five years as a municipal choice asks a different type of adoption than a vision standing in the same formulations elsewhere too. Embedding as a KPI asks that a vision or framework distinguish itself from the generic paraphrase. That distinction can lie in operational arrangements (which providers, which routes, which deviation from the regional model), in financial arrangements (what percentage of the social-domain budget does the municipality keep apart for local interventions), or in legal arrangements (which by-law leaves room that is nailed down in other municipalities). What embedding cannot do is depend on the textual quality of the vision. Embedding asks that the text name something that is workable after adoption.

The third action perspective is to make deliberate work of the joint-arrangement position. A director of a joint arrangement works in an organisation that forms norms without a mandate to do so. That is no reproach to the director. It is a diagnosis of the position. What a director can do is arrange the organisation so that the consultation procedure is given form not as a ritual but as a real substantive moment, that the budget is prepared at a pace the councils can still follow, and that the operational choices that do lie within the organisation’s own margin are clearly marked. That is no solution to the democratic deficit of the joint-arrangement architecture. It is a design choice within an architecture that is not being rebuilt.

The fourth action perspective is to build up an execution dossier for the cases in which co-governance structurally does not work. When a municipality or a joint arrangement establishes that the combination of central-government policy, funding and execution room is structurally insufficient, the next step is not short-lived administrative consultation with the Interior Ministry or the relevant department. The next step is a dossier that qualifies for incidental review or for arbitration, on the model of the youth-care arbitration of May 2021 under the chairmanship of Richard van Zwol. That arbitration awarded 1.9 billion euros over 2022 and formulated the core in legal language: the principles for inter-administrative financial relations between central state and municipalities require that the central state compensate municipalities for the actual shortfalls on youth care.¹⁶ That such a fundamental ruling had to be enforced outside the administrative court is itself a diagnosis of the system. But it also makes clear, for the senior administrator in the same position, that the route exists, and that it is travelled by building up dossiers that can carry the incidental test.

These are not action perspectives that break the pattern. They are action perspectives that, within the pattern, make room for execution that knows how to relate to the inversion without affirming it.

§ 11 · Closing

A trias politica that has reconfigured itself without being redesigned has no moment of repair that presents itself from the architecture itself. The Constitution has not been amended since 1983 on the provisions this paper touches. A revision on these points is, on the basis of the political landscape of 2025-2026, not near. The actual distribution of roles reproduces itself, precisely because it is not named as a distribution of roles. The council adopts visions it does not choose, the cabinet legislates via departments that stand in no Constitution, the upper house brakes on coalition lines not assigned to it, the lower house reflects on a production for which it is not responsible, the court norms on grounds lying outside the statute, and Brussels decides on law executed in the Netherlands by governments that did not make it themselves.

That is a working state. It delivers a considerable part of its public value, despite the inversion. The executive apparatus keeps it largely standing. The court has, since Urgenda and the Box 3 judgments, delivered a form of protection that the original legislator no longer delivers. The municipality executes what the central state decides, with the empathy and the competence of professionals who want to do their work.

What is missing is that the inversion names itself. As long as that is missing, the architecture goes on operating like a family in which the child runs the house, the parent becomes invisible, and no one wonders who is sitting at the table. The system works. Statecraft’s question is what remains of it when the stress rises. That is an open question. This paper delivers no answer to it. It delivers only the conceptual building blocks with which senior professionals in this system can place their work. The diagnosis that gets a name is not yet the diagnosis that gets treated. But without the diagnosis every attempt at treatment remains a form-laundering of the problem it claims to solve.

The parentified council that adopts the vision is no failing council. It is a council that functions in a distribution of roles that should not fall to it. Whoever sees that can, within that distribution of roles, deliver work that does not coincide with the inversion. That is, on the specific intersection at which Statecraft operates, the highest demand on public work in the Netherlands in 2026.

Footnotes

Statecraft · Series III, paper 8 · v0.2, May 2026 · Jacob Huibers

For the broader institutional and civilisational embedding see Restoration State Netherlands (2025), All Displaced (in preparation) and Decline and Revival (2025). For the analytical framework see De Richting van de Beweging: Interim Management in the Public Sector (in preparation).

The motion-to-amendment ratio is worked out in The Dissociated Legislator (Statecraft, April 2026). The numerical development is based on the parliamentary monitor of the lower house and on Court of Audit reporting; the exact ratio per year to be verified in final editing. ↩
Supreme Court 20 December 2019, ECLI:NL:HR:2019:2006 (Urgenda); Supreme Court 24 December 2021, ECLI:NL:HR:2021:1963 (Box 3 Christmas judgment); Supreme Court 6 June 2024, ECLI:NL:HR:2024:704 (Box 3 legal redress). ↩
Iván Boszormenyi-Nagy and Geraldine Spark, Invisible Loyalties: Reciprocity in Intergenerational Family Therapy (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). Gregory Jurkovic, Lost Childhoods: The Plight of the Parentified Child (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1997). For the Dutch family-therapy reception see also Justine van Lawick and Martine Groen, Violence in families (Houten: Bohn Stafleu van Loghum, revised edition 2014). ↩
The rough estimate of the share of co-governance in municipal budgets is based on Statistics Netherlands Iv3 data 2024 (table 45069NED) combined with the breakdown of the Municipalities Fund and the specific grants in Maintenance Report on Specific Grants 2025 (Interior Ministry). The exact ratio varies per municipality and depends on the definition of the autonomous household. A more precise calculation is to be considered for the publication version. ↩
Treaty text of the European Charter of Local Self-Government, Trb. 1987, 63. The Dutch reservation to Article 11 is elaborated in the approval act, Stb. 1991, 1. ↩
Register of joint arrangements, organisaties.overheid.nl. Counting methods diverge; range 350-700 depending on whether centre-municipality constructions and bare arrangements are counted. ↩
Berenschot, Monitor of regional cooperation (various editions 2017-2024); judges’ association study autumn 2017. The order of magnitude is consistent over the years. ↩
Statistics Netherlands Iv3, joint arrangements 2024. Volumes via centre-municipality constructions and cooperation agreements are not fully included in these figures. ↩
Council of State advice W04.20.0015, Government Gazette 2020. ↩
Lower house of the States General, plenary record of the debate on the Amendment of the Joint Arrangements Act, May 2021. ↩
Act on Improving the Availability of Youth Care, Stb. 2025, 283. Accepted by the upper house on 7 October 2025. Entry-into-force decree Stb. 2025, 358 (5 November 2025): largely from 1 January 2026, with the provisions on compulsory regional cooperation (Articles 2.18, 2.19 and 2.21 of the Youth Act) from 1 January 2027. For the three Wgr forms from which the Youth Region can choose, see the explanatory memorandum and the Decree on Improving the Availability of Youth Care. ↩
Decree on Improving the Availability of Youth Care, Stb. 2025, 358; contains the regional division, the designated forms of youth care that are at least procured regionally, and the subjects that must be included in the regional vision. ↩
Availability act, Article I, parts U and V, with the supervisory tasks of the Healthcare Authority from 1 January 2026 (system research, early signalling) and from 1 January 2027 (transparent financial management, public annual accountability). See also the explanatory notes to Stb. 2025, 358 on the legislative-technical link between early signalling and regional cooperation. ↩
Scope of the Youth Act bill, internet consultation 16 February to 13 April 2026, www.internetconsultatie.nl. The Sturdy Local Teams covenant was signed on 23 March 2026 by the Association of Netherlands Municipalities, the Ministries of Health and Education, the Association of Neighbourhood Teams, the Cooperating Professional Associations for Youth, the regional public-health body, ActiZ Youth, MIND, Ieder(in) and Social Work Netherlands. The ambition of a reduction from one in seven to one in ten young people in youth care by 2028 is elaborated in the cabinet letter accompanying the internet consultation. For the Digital System for the Environment and Planning Act see the Environment and Planning Act (Stb. 2016, 156) and the Environment Decree, in force since 1 January 2024. ↩
Mark H. Moore, Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). ↩
Youth Care Arbitration Committee under the chairmanship of R.J.A. van Zwol, ruling May 2021. Award of 1.9 billion euros over 2022. Quotation from Dutch law taken via Dissociated Organisations (Statecraft, 2026). ↩