ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the decision-making process on the Rural Area Plan. The purpose of this analysis is to determine to what extent the decision-making on the Rural Area Plan can be seen as an illustration of the 'polder model', the typical Dutch consensus democracy. The new planning document required a special decision-making procedure: the Planologische Kem Beslissing-procedure. This procedure was relatively new and is mainly adopted in policy processes concerning spatial planning issues. The structure of decision-making in rural area policy, and the Rural Area Plan in particular, is quite complicated. A different aspect of power is the power distribution that emerges from the decision-making on this policy document. Although the influence of the bureaucracy on political decisions in general should not surprise anyone, the stamp of the civil servants in rural area policy is more powerful than that of any category of actors. In contrast to the civil servants, parliamentarians are definitely less powerful in this particular policy field.
