Tamara Ribbers
These days businesses are divided into many departments. For example, at the police you have got the street police, detectives, management of the teams, financial managers, etc. Even between companies there are often problems because of these many departments. With all these departments a good managerial structure is necessary to have optimal processes. Unfortunately this is often not the case. With the municipality as overlying all communications and actions have to go through the municipality. This influences the quick actions policemen and aid agencies have to make. Managers of the municipality first have to agree to certain changes in the neighborhood or special help an inhabitant needs. This process often takes many weeks, while the action is needed there right now.
To find a solution one must look at governance, but what is governance? Bevir states in a short introduction to governance that “Governance refers to all processes of governing, whether undertaken by a government market, or network, whether over a family, tribe, formal or informal organization, or territory, and whether through laws, norms, power, or language.”. The problem with the current organizational structures political institutions have limited capabilities to ‘steer’ because of social systems have dynamics that are determined by all kinds of institutional, cultural, technological and other factors. Systems are influenced by the
interplay of societal and state actors, boundaries of state and non-state action are becoming blurred. This creates a very hard situation for the government to change current systems with the constantly increasing complexity of social systems.
There is no more a single solution to a problem and the group of actors keeps increasing. This makes it also hard to respond quick to current problems. First all actors have to be mapped before actions can be taken. Due to this complex situation and the increasing amount of time these processes take, more and more irritations from other parties. A neighborhood agent from Bouwlust stated in an interview the increasing process time for cases at the municipality. While several cases need to be solved really quick, the municipality has not enough manpower to solve these cases in time.