Less transformation, more change
What earthquakes in the Netherlands can teach us about administrative change
Did you know that there are earthquakes in the Netherlands? They didn’t used to – their earthquakes are man-made, a consequence of decades of natural gas extraction from the Slochteren field. This Cambridge report calls it “induced seismicity”, fancy right? I’m bringing this up because it’s the setting for a wild story of continued attempts of administrative transformation that I believe has a lot to teach us about the pace of change in public service, and how that links to political actors and the expectations of the public.
I heard about this story at a conference last year. The paper on it is not published yet, so I will only share points that are google-able, based on my understanding to illustrate a point.
The natural gas extraction in the Netherlands had caused minor tremors for a while, but in in 2012 a significant earthquake around a 3.6 magnitude struck near Groningen – which might not sound like much in New Zealand, but in a country set on sandstone and with buildings that were never meant to withstand earthquakes, that’s severe. Consequently – and because the tremors kept coming since – there’s widespread damage, with this article from 2022 stating that
“3,300 buildings have been demolished in the province because of earthquake damage since 2012. (…) Ongoing research from the University of Groningen estimated that up to 100,000 people in the province had suffered damage from the quakes.”
That’s a whopper for any country. Of course, people looked to their government for support and redress.
What followed on the administrative side was described in the paper, and to cut along story short: the Netherlands have since seen several cycles of public organisations being tasked with managing claims, writing and enforcing new policy (since their building code never had to accommodate earthquakes before), and dealing with the gas extraction issue.
From the researchers’ retelling:
The various responsibilities were transferred to a new organisation three times in less than a decade – and in two cases that was an entirely new organisation that was established in response to public complaints.
At NO POINT does it seem like claims were processed at a decent pace, and the people who had suffered damage continued in “administrative limbo” for years. By 2019 many claims had still not been processed, as more earthquakes caused ever more claims, and the newly established organisations were busy clashing with the older ones, e.g. building code writers with heritage policy.
We can establish that that sucks. People have every right to be angry.
Every few years the government would respond to protests by disestablishing, merging or splitting the responsible organisation, or requiring their reform in some other way.
A sick cycle, if ever I’ve heard of one:
At some point of this incredible tale, there was a parliamentary inquiry that called for less transformation and more incremental changes. That’s all they wrote, for now.
In this case, the damage and the failing of processing claims for years is a pretty self-evident problem and I can understand all actors involved here. The same happens in much less severe extends all the time. This cycle that all administrations seem to be wrestling with – a sense that you can never wrap your head around what’s happening before a new policy drops.
There are two ways to interpret the bigger picture of this story:
1.That we don’t have effective and flexible ways to manage and direct change in public service organisations at pace, and
2.That political figures (and perhaps the public) continuously under-estimate how long it takes for a new directive to settle into operations.
I believe that both is true.
In my studies, I’ve read more theories about how and why structural reforms ARE DOOMED fail – the louder we declare action, the less likely it is that something will change, as my favourite scholar writes (yes, I have one of those now, apparently). And at the same time, faced with real pressure, there’s no better way to show action than to start a reform, bang the table and take radical action. It’s such a knee-jerk reaction, yet one could also ask: If I were one of those people with a cracked house whose claim hasn’t been processed for years – would I not also want to see a radical shift? I don’t trust those fellas in their safe offices no more, so someone bring in some new ones!
It’s a catch 22, because every action like this, every reform, causes more work in itself. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. It’s much less tangible and visible work. It’s BORING stuff that no one will have empathy for – admin, legalities, systems, document management, all the infrastructure that keeps the lights on. And when a demand is as new as the earthquake building code in the Netherlands, it’s no small task to negotiate its policy implications into the existing ecosystem.
I wrote about the cracks and precarious links between policy, process and practice, and how many workarounds exist in public institutions (and in private ones, no doubt). Together, they make changes so much more glacial than a member of the public can imagine.
“It can’t be that hard” is really only something one can say from the outside.
More than that, change takes a long time because the public sector is build (very intentionally) for stability, cohesion, fairness and for the long run (something I’ll certainly write about another time).
That said, in all my academic papers about restructuring, I maintain that it does not look to me like the public sector has a robust way to handle complex change in a directed and measured fashion. Least of all the latter. I don’t think it’s an either/or case - the Dutch administration fails or succeeds - but the bar could certainly be moved into a healthier direction, towards the interests of the person with a crumbling home. And the same is true for us.
I’ve shared my conviction before that New Zealand has a particularly unrestrained pace of change in its public reforms. I know this sounds strange to people who believe the public service is where people go to chill out. But with our single chamber, 3-year terms and direct ministerial relationships, political impulses can hail on the public service with impunity.
In the end I always come back to this:
Ye olde chestnut of quality, cost or time. For argument’s sake (this is speculation): in the Dutch case one might have been able to speed things up if one brought down the requirements for claims to be approved.
Less paperwork, less assurance, fewer checks.
The consequence would be that a (difficult to anticipate) number of people might get funds that they don’t strictly deserve, increasing cost and lowering quality. That would be the tradeoff - and that’s the key to bureaucracy: checking up, regulating, policing - all that costs time and resources.
I want to bring it back to this: I do have a lot of reason to believe that the public service is lacking flexible, new methods to manage change – to the detriment of the public interest. But I’m also convinced that there is a natural limit to the pace at which change can be managed in a way that’s justified for a public sector that follows its ethos. This limit comes down to the degree of bureacracy that we find is healthy for our society, and the degree to which our political leaders use their power to keep swinging the pendulum of public change, e.g. between centralised and decentralised, public and private - a story as old as time.
I wish that political leaders would have greater appreciation for the amount of time and effort it takes to settle new demands into practice, and for the role that they play to make the administrative better, or clogging it up with demands. And I wish that, rather than continuing to spin the wheel of restructures, the public service would be afforded the opportunity to pinpoint the systemic changes that might allow the cogs to meet a little faster when that is needed. But that’s a story for another day.