Research-Policy Dialogues in the Netherlands

Abstract

The Netherlands was one of the first countries in Europe to formulate a coordinated national policy on migrant integration, in the early 1980s. In the 2000s, it was again among the first to make a sharp assimilationist turn away from the multicultural model. Much of the extensive ethnic monitoring structure set up in the 1980s and 1990s still exists, but the positivist belief in the role of scientific research as a tool for societal engineering in this area has clearly declined. Formal research-policy dialogue structures have been largely dismantled, and dialogues that continue to exist have become strongly politicised and mediatised. Knowledge use has become more selective and largely instrumental, mainly dictated be the needs of politicians. The analysis in this chapter also suggests that the combined politicisation and mediatisation of research-policy dialogues on migrant integration may have created a new boundary, one between mediatised and non-mediatised research-policy dialogues. Consequently, the old boundary between the two worlds of research and policy may have lost some of its relevance. At the same time, the growing apart of policymakers and the academic world has also facilitated the development of a more varied, and therefore much richer research landscape.