In municipal politics, council members have been experimenting with and working on coalition agreements that solely contain the essential outlines. Lianne van Kalken, lecturer and researcher of Constitutional Law at Erasmus School of Law, conducted research into this phenomenon and cooperated on the roadmap for council agreements.
The most significant advantage of outline agreements is that it causes much more cooperation between the opposition and the council members, as opposed to a sealed-off coalition agreement. An outline agreement leaves more room for debate. “In municipalities that already use these agreements, the opposition works a lot closer together with the municipal executives”, Van Kalken states to EenVandaag. “In fact, the whole council is more involved with governing.”
However, this system does not always seem to work, Van Kalken explains: “Some municipalities struggle to stick to the agreement and fall back into old habits, in which case the coalition returns to making agreements behind closed doors. That is why we made a roadmap on how to properly set up these kinds of agreements.”
In a recent article in which the roadmap is described, Van Kalken draws a parallel with the current formation of the Dutch government, for which mandator Tjeenk Willink expressed the wish for a similar outline agreement on a national level.
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Read the full article of EenVandaag (in Dutch) here.