Measuring the Stakes: The Dutch Planning Bureaus

The planning bureaus are knowledge institutes that provide the Dutch government with knowledge about the present and future state of the country and how it is affected by the government’s policies. The name is somewhat misleading, as planning may invoke associations with the faltering centralisation policies of the darker days in really existing socialism. These institutes are not involved in planning the economy or the provision of services through statecontrolled resource allocation, but in the provision of policy relevant knowledge. For these reasons, they prefer to use terms like policy assessment institutes in their English names, although their Dutch names are anchored in law and have become commonplace in Dutch political parlance – and hence I prefer to use planning bureau in English too. Currently, there are four planning bureaus in the Netherlands: one providing advice for economic policy, one providing advice for environmental and nature conservation policy, one for social policy, and one for urban and regional planning policy. They are government institutes with agency status. Each of the institutes answers to a government minister, who caries their political responsibility and is responsible for their research agenda. The bureaus therefore fall under the authority of the executive, but all of them stress their status as independent researchers. It is, in fact, through their skilful performance of independence that they can provide policy makers with knowledge that is considered reliable and neutral to an extraordinary degree. In this chapter, I will show how they manage this remarkable feat. Together, the planning bureaus spend about 55 million Euros per year on research, resulting in almost three hundred reports per year, as well as numerous occasions of daily advice to policy makers. Reports include policy relevant topics such as: options for public-private cooperation in infrastructure (Lijesen/Shestalova 2007), overall short-term economic prognoses (Centraal Planbureau 2007), a model for the labour participation of women with child-