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In the Netherlands, the majority of financial and compliance audits of local government are conducted by private audit firms, while courts of audit are in charge of conducting performance audits. External auditors are appointed by the municipal council based on a tendering procedure, creating a dual system of responsibilities between the council and the Board of Mayor and Aldermen. The recent trend that several large audit firms have withdrawn from the municipal audit market and the strong need for public sector expertise because of the complexity and uniqueness of local government call for rethinking current auditing practices in this sector.

Purpose: This study examines whether changes in environmental and funding uncertainty during the first three years after the outbreak of the global financial crisis (which we presume to have increased significantly) are associated with changes in cost system design and intensity of use.

Design/methodology/approach: A dataset of survey responses from 56 Dutch municipalities is used for the empirical analyses. In the questionnaire, a senior-level financial manager reflected on the changes that he or she had perceived during the three years prior to the study (which was conducted at the end of 2010).

Findings: The results show that during these years, on average, ­environmental and funding uncertainty have indeed significantly increased, whereas cost system design and intensity of use have shown little change. The results further indicate that change in environmental uncertainty is positively related to changes in cost system complexity and cost system inclusiveness for activities and/or programs, whereas change in funding uncertainty is positively related to change in cost system intensity of use for product costing purposes. Also, change in cost system complexity is positively related to changes in cost system intensity of use for both operational control and product costing purposes.

Originality/value: Whereas previous large-scale research tends to focus on how the level of cost system design and/or intensity of use characteristics is related to the level of contextual factors, this study focuses on how changes in cost system design and intensity of use characteristics are related to changes in contextual factors. Also distinctive is that this study focuses on local government organizations experiencing a fiscal crisis.

This chapter describes the emergence and functioning of an interinstitutional research group. The topic of this research group, which was started by five large universities of applied sciences (UAS) in the western metropolitan area of the Netherlands, is the study success of ethnic minority groups. With only minor funding by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science a dedicated research team, representing each of the UAS involved, set out to address several unresolved research questions and issues. The Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture did also provided access to an essential national research data which is normally not accessible for individual institutions. Besides working together on study success research, regular consultation started at the corporate/board level and at the strategic level (directors of education policies) on various study success-related topics, such as new legislation and diversity issues. What differentiates this cooperation from other networks is its multilayered structure and the sharing of detailed data about sensitive strategic issues, policymaking and institutional research by competing UAS. This chapter provides insights on effective working methods, dilemmas and first year achievements of this intensive interinstitutional collaboration. The chapter concludes with ten factors for success in the context described.

As the Dutch East India Company expanded its presence in Asia during the seventeenth century, discovery of new products and medical materials was central to its continued success and survival. This new product innovation was difficult to manage directly however because the routine-driven, efficiency-focused organization was ill-suited to research and discovery required for bioprospecting and innovation. Instead, the Company tacitly allowed its employees in Asia to conduct this research on their own. Scientists became free riders, exploiting their administrative authority and corporate resources to further their private research projects. This symbiotic public–private partnership enabled employees to use Company resources to undertake large-scale economic and scientific surveys of its Asian domains. These decentralized, entrepreneurial projects cut across the boundaries of caste, language, religion, and theoretical orientation to assemble new, systematic views of Asian knowledge. While not centrally planned (nor always officially condoned), these surveying efforts had all of the hallmarks of a systematic colonial project to map out the sources of value in foreign colonies.

Neighborhood governance has become a widespread approach to improving the quality of life in cities. The idea is that sustained interactions between public professionals and residents will better meet the needs of local areas and people. However, neighborhood working approaches purporting to provide tailor-made policies and solutions tend to perpetuate habitual practices and hegemonic institutions of hierarchy and competition. This chapter enquires how conditions can be created for different kinds of conversations and relationships to emerge that lead to innovative practices and sustainable change. I argue that public professionals need not only interact extensively with residents but should also engage in encounters with an open mind. Empirically illustrated with an innovative approach to neighborhood working in Amsterdam (the Netherlands), I explain how they can go beyond habitual practices by letting new shared views and actions emerge in-between them. Doing so fosters deeper institutional transformations toward a relational grounding for urban governance and public administration.

After nearly 12,000 years living in the Holocene geological age we have now arrived in the Anthropocene. Now, instead of an integral ecology that considers the world as having its ecology, economy, and justice systematically linked, we are confronted by an ecology dominated by a profit-driven economy.

Since its very first beginnings, Western philosophy has reflected on humanity’s relationship with nature. Is the history of Western philosophy, then, merely a reflection of the evolution of humanity from the Holocene to the Anthropocene? Or did Western philosophical thought, along with industrialization and economic development, play a far bigger part and was it, indeed, the regulator of this evolution?

Our spontaneous care for nature – not at any price or exclusively – has led to an elegy. However rereading Western philosophy can help us to discover that the evolution toward the Anthropocene could challenge man to descry meaning behind nature. The way man regulates nature can be oriented toward rediscovering meaning behind nature. And the question of transcendence cannot be avoided.