Modes of Governance in the Dutch Social Housing Sector

Abstract: We describe and analyze five consecutive modes of governance in the Dutch social housing sector. We compare these institutional forms with the five policy values that the sector was assumed to realize. For that purpose we propose and use a new, analytical framework based on a separation principle that is applied to the coercion domain (the governance of transactions) as well as to the interaction domain (the welfare values). The consecutive modes of governance were introduced to cope with the changing welfare policies, but with varying results. In this paper we show that the implemented modes of governance in the Dutch social housing sector did not always realize the values that the sector was supposed to deliver. The framework we propose also facilitates the discussion about the concept of a social enterprise and the embedding of a service of general interest in the European Union.