Illuminating the Black Box of the Government to Governance Transformation Thesis The Case of Dutch City Deals

The Dutch national government likes to present itself as modern, open and having embraced the transition from government to governance (transformation thesis). In 2015, it launched its ‘Urban Agenda’ to harness the creative potential of cities to solve complex problems by means of city deals: voluntary agreements between municipalities, national ministries and private parties. City deals were supposed to operate according to the precepts of network governance and reap the benefits commonly associated with it. In 2017, research was carried out to investigate whether this was the case. Based on 44 in-depth structured interviews with a representative sample of participants, the city deals were found to exhibit network governance attributes to widely differing degrees. Moreover, little correlation was found between network governance attributes and positive outcomes. As such, this empirical investigation supports the recent critiques of the transformation thesis.