Since the 1950s, airports have become popular transport infrastructures for the economic growth of cities and urban regions. However, increased awareness regarding their negative environmental effects poses key challenges for the future of aviation industry. In this study, we propose an integrated, co-evolutionary conceptual framework (CoFACt) to assess to what extent the tension between airport economic capacity and environmental impacts has been successfully managed. We empirically validate our framework by examining seven airports in Western Europe by using both quantitative and qualitative data. The comparative analysis of our sample shows that a high airport environmental capacity can be reached when (larger) airports are located in the vicinity to city centres, where aviation-related operations have been balanced with the needs of local communities, a low environmental capacity is found in our sample when tensions emerge between airport operations and the need to preserve surrounding environmental areas (environmental land-use conflicts). The CoFACt framework provides a structured approach to balance economic growth with environmental stewardship in airport operations. Its interdisciplinary nature and scalability also allow for continuous adaptation to evolving challenges, making it a valuable tool for sustainable airport management and community engagement.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced surprised governments worldwide to act fast and decisively, often revealing lack of preparation for this kind of situation. However, such crises are expected to occur far more frequently than ever before. To keep societies prospering, governments, administrations, and civil servants will have to adapt quickly and effectively—and hence need to develop the required capabilities (e.g., appropriate policies, strategies, knowledge, skills). To deepen our understanding of appropriate action in face of crises, resulting consequences for stability and required, demanded or enforced behavior of people, we propose the concept of resilience. Resilience, we argue by way of five propositions, helps articulating the underlying dynamics in society and its administrative systems in order to allow for a sustainable incorporation of the long-term perspective in the short-term strategy, particularly in times of disturbances and temporary perturbations.

This article presents a tool to disclose public values as emergent properties of needs on a systemic basis applied to a city district in Rotterdam. A tool which enables the public manager to identify public values in any territory based on how people think and feel about society. To accomplish this, it uses Group Model Building (GMB) principles to elicit the mental models that individuals use to make sense of their environment. The results show how the tool enhances a manager's situational awareness and could assists him with information-driven service delivery.

We assess to what extent a (co)evolutionary macro level approach enhances our understanding of learning in governance processes. We ask the question: in what ways do actors learn to improve their chances of long-term survival in complex governance processes? We deploy a model of collective decision making moulded upon fitness landscapes to analyze a longitudinal case study of collective (political and administrative) decision making, namely the process of developing and acquiring the F35 Lightning II fighter jet. The study demonstrates that actors learn how to ensure survival over time but create a failing megaproject in the process.

Complex planning processes bear the hallmarks of evolution, in that actors seek to obtain the results that serve their needs best. That is, seek to increase their fitness. As in biological evolution, there are multiple pathways toward fitness. With the rise of adaptive planning approaches, the question how such pathways can be identified in strategic planning processes becomes pivotal. To answer this question, we adapt the fitness landscape model from biology and analyze several strategic planning processes. The analysis demonstrates that one can trace how different pathways to fitness emerge, and which pathways are more successful given the circumstances. We then synthesize these pathways into six strategic archetypes of actor behavior and of interactions between actors.

textabstractWe set out to develop a method and research technique that could unite both modelling and case-based observations in order to analyse collective decision-making processes. Following Abbott’s (2001) recommendation regarding social processes, we have defined collective decision-making as an uninterrupted and non-directional process that is structured in sequences or lineages of events. To structure these processes, we re-modelled the basic components of Kauffman’s (1993) NK-model. We converted N to ‘problem and solution definitions’ (PSDs) and K to ‘connectedness’ between actors (c_score). An important modification is that we consider NK to be a dependent configuration; i.e., K entails both content and process. Fitness is defined as the probability of an actor achieving (elements of) its PSD as a result of its adaptive moves in relation to the adaptive moves of others. The model is put to the test in four different studies: (1) 20 years of decision-making in planning, building and servicing HSL-Zuid high-speed railways in the Netherlands; (2) the strategic search process of villages and cantons in the Gotthard region of Switzerland; (3) the redevelopment of a football stadium and the surrounding area in south Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and (4) the rise and fall of the Airport RailLink in Bangkok, Thailand. From these studies, we derived six archetypes in collection decision-making, subdivided into actor archetypes and interaction archetypes. For the actor archetypes, behavioural consistency is not just a trait for the actor but also affects the space of possibilities and/or behaviours of other actors. The interactions of individual actors combine to produce self-propagating dynamics that drive the further evolution of the collective decision-making process. The fitness field model enables researchers to investigate the various dimensions of the collective decision-making process – ranging from individual strategies and actions to variation, selection and retention of contents, from interactions to fitness gains and losses, and back again.

There is considerable correspondence between theories and models used in biology and the social sciences. One type of model that is in use in both biology and the social sciences is the fitness landscape model. The properties of the fitness landscape model have been applied rather freely in the social domain. This is partly due to the versatility of the model, but it is also due to the difficulties of transferring a model to another domain. We will demonstrate that in order to transfer the biological fitness landscape model to the social science it needs to be substantially modified. We argue that the syntactic structure of the model can remain unaltered, whilst the semantic dimension requires considerable modification in order to fit the specific phenomena in the social sciences. We will first discuss the origin as well as the basic properties of the model. Subsequently, we will demonstrate the considerations and modifications pertaining to such a transfer by showing how and why we altered the model to analyse collective decision-making processes. We will demonstrate that the properties of the target domain allow for a transfer of the syntactic structure but don't tolerate the semantic transfer.

UN-CODE is a web-based tool for structuring and visualizing collective decision-making processes using qualitative, case-based data. It offers a database management tool and visualization method in one. The structure of the database and the visualizations derive from a model that is rooted in evolutionary biology and that has been transformed for social scientists. It features three principal dimensions: problem and solution definitions (PSD), weighted connectedness (c_score) as a network measure, and fitness (FIT) to describe the probability of actors reaching their goals in the collective decision-making process. The results are visualized in a scalable 3D-environment that shows the main dynamics of such in one quick overview. Funding statement: This research has been funded by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research research grant no. 451-10-022.

Alwyn Turner’s compendious study, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (2013), ends after 574 richly observed pages seemingly contradicting its title. Turner writes of John Major and Tony Blair, that ‘both had sought to create a classless society, both had failed, with wealth inequality increasing and social mobility decreasing, and both found themselves ill at ease with the kind of classless culture that emerged instead’ (574). Turner adds that Major and Blair (and before them, Margaret Thatcher) had aimed to refashion Britain as a meritocracy, where ability was more pertinent and consequential than family background and traditional networks of social power.

Actors making public decisions about a certain policy issue in one particular arena also meet in other arenas where they will have to make decisions on other issues. By incorporating information from across coevolving arenas, actors make associations between the decisions in the different arenas. To understand the dynamics of associations, we deployed a formal game-theoretic approach and run an experiment. Subjects played two different games, each representing a different decision-making arena. The results show that history builds-up and that subjects made associations between the two games, partly explaining the behaviour of decision-makers interacting in multilevel decision-making settings.

The pace of societal change and the development of societal challenges have speeded up considerably during the last couple of decades, with substantial impact on different levels, i.e. ranging from global to local, or from business to government. When focusing on the public domain, these changes and challenges have had a major impact on public professionals, who face different and frequently changing questions. Mid-career programs in Public Administration (MPA) have the mission to support enrolled professionals in dealing with these changes and challenges. This article is about the development of such MPAs. Both substantive and didactic development is needed. To counter institutional inertia it seems vital to institutionalize a regular rethinking and adaptation of curricula and didactic strategies. This article identified some important points of attention and some options to deal with these in order to continuously improve the contribution of MPA programs to relevant and effective professional development and ongoing professional learning.

One of the main challenges facing contemporary society is to understand how people can make decisions together. Understanding Collective Decision Making builds on evolutionary theories and presents an analytical tool to analyse and visualise collective decision making. By combining theoretical research with real world case studies, the authors provide a coherent and conclusive solution to the often fragmented and dispersed literature on the subject.

This special issue looks at the current debates on the coevolution of policy and innovation. We discuss the theoretical and empirical roots of this debate and provide an outlook to the papers within the special issue.

A recurring issue in (mid-career) master programs Public Administration is to get students to become (more) reflexive (conf. e.g. special issue of Teaching Public Administration 2013). As academic graduates they should not merely apply public administration theories and methods in standardized ways but always think critically about what they do and why. Moreover they should be able to make sensible, situated connections between ‘theory’ and ‘praxis’ and critically and creatively derive new modes of professional action from these. To achieve this students should approach their study with the main intention to develop personal understanding (e.g. Marton & Säljö, 1976; Trigwell, 2010). In this article the redesign of a course in a two year mid-career master program from a traditional instructional mode to blended learning, will be discussed and analyzed to see if the redesign attributed to more reflexive working methods in the course and a more reflexive attitude in students.

Abstract Purpose One ambition of most mid-career MPA programmes is to combine the attainment of an academic master degree with a qualitative leap in professional skills and functioning. This ambition requires that academic insights and methods be sensibly linked to real-life professional contexts and challenges. This chapter develops a rationale to enhance conditions and mechanisms that help to produce such linking, based on insights in professional learning. Design/methodology/approach Two methods used in the mid-career MPA programme at Erasmus University Rotterdam to help students to establish such links will be discussed. The first method involves an evolving personal learning agenda and the second method involves peer-to-peer coaching. Both methods will also be used to evaluate the added value of the programme for the professional functioning of the students. Findings The MPA programme makes students link theory to their own real-life practice and changes their perspective on analysis and professional intervention. Often, however, these new perspectives are quite general in nature, not taking much account of the specific context. Thorough lecturer feedback and training in peer consultation may help students to become more reflexive and to develop better situation-specific strategies. Practical implications The findings point to the need for further development of didactical strategies. Originality/value The chapter analyses professional added value of an academic programme.

Main-stream evaluations of failed policies are geared towards finding a limited set of factors that are deemed to have caused the problem. This is particularly so in the case of high-profile public projects such as in technology and infrastructure development. While justified from the point of political accountability, this article presents an alternative view. Following insights from evolutionary economics and complex systems about the embedded nature of technological systems and the role of chance next to purposeful planning, we demonstrate that traditional policy evaluations are misguided when geared towards simplistic cause-and-effect relations. To this end, we analyze the reasons for the mixed results in the Dutch high-speed railway case. The findings show that, contrary to popular opinions in the political domain, technological progress did take place. However, misalignment between social practices and technological systems masked that progress.

Research and teaching are core business of academic institutions. The research context is thought to be fruitful for teaching and learning, and students may contribute to research. But how exactly does the interplay between research and teaching take place and how, in what respects and under which conditions, does this contribute to the quality of research and teaching? The article makes an inventory of functions of research in teaching in public administration curricula. It elaborates on conditions and mechanisms for effective realization of these functions, based on the contributions to this special issue, literature and our own insights and experiences. We evaluate and reflect on different functions and modes of linking research and teaching and to explore relevant conditions for their use.