Patterns of science-policy interaction

This chapter focuses on the category of policy analysts who are located in advisory bodies as scientific experts, explicitly tasked as boundary workers in boundary organizations between science and policy/politics. A brief introduction (section 1) sets out the manifold and complex modes of science-informed policy advice in the Netherlands. These will be interpreted through a minimalist multilevel framework for science-informed policy advice as boundary work (section 2). At policy politics level (section 3), it will be argued that one may distinguish between advisory arrangements fit for (relatively) structured and (relatively) unstructured problems. At ideological level (section 4), at least three policy styles may be discerned: a neo-corporatist, a neo-liberal and a deliberative one. In the final section (5), it is argued that there is not one ‘Dutch’ model, but that the patterns co-evolve and permeate each other, although loaded with ideological and pragmatic disagreements and contradictions