ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies typical sequences of policy failures, caused by the misfit between new problems and existing policy-legacies. It shows that the self-transformation of the Dutch welfare-state has its basis in policy change across various policy-areas and how – over time – these changes created the conditions and the demand for one another. The chapter points to instances where policy learning of the kind was blocked by conflicts of interest or by divergent cognitive orientations in multi-actor institutional settings of the Dutch 'negotiating economy'. It traces the progressive reconfiguration of Dutch social and economic policy. The chapter shows how policy makers failed to manage the "Dutch disease". It examines the politically risky and path-breaking reforms in welfare policy and innovation in labour-market policy and regulation in the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. The chapter offers more general lessons from the Dutch experience of policy learning through concertation.
