PhD defence B.M. (Beatrijs) Jansen

Dissertation in short:

Since 2015, local government has been responsible for youth care. The intention is that this decentralization contributes to a transformation of youth care, so that it becomes better and cheaper. Transformation is a long-term process and an interplay of social developments, developments in organizations and in the organizational field, coalitions, action groups, established organizations and management. Municipalities are one of the actors, with limited control options. There is a need for more knowledge about the influence that local government has and can have on the behavior of youth care providers and knowledge about why youth care providers differ in their response to direction by municipalities.

Municipalities try to influence youth care providers in different ways and to varying degrees. That was a unique opportunity to investigate whether steering matters and whether differences in steering matters. It was investigated how five municipalities do this and how eighteen youth care providers respond to this.

The fact that management has become increasingly complex in recent years is also apparent from this PhD research. For example, the different ways in which local government  can control, hierarchically, network and market management have their own limitations and are often at odds with each other. Youth care providers do not always react in the same way at the same way of steering. This is because they differ in the extent to which they want, can and must meet the expectations and requirements that the municipalities place on them.

This study shows that, despite all the complexity, local government can achieve more than they do now and provides tools for more adequate governance.