Introduction

The Dutch polder model – the harmonious collaboration of employers’ organisations, trade unions and government – has long been praised as an innovative and effective way of dealing with socio-economic issues. The so-called Wassenaar Agreement from 1982 – the agreement between business associations and trade unions to trade-off extremely low wage increases and employment growth – is even sometimes believed to be the key to the good performance of the Dutch economy over the years (Visser and Hemerijck, 1997). In this chapter, we show how, over time, the central institutions of the Dutch polder, with the Social Economic Council (Sociaal-Economische Raad; SER) as its primary representative, have developed into important producers of what might be called ‘negotiated knowledge’. We also argue that the collaboration in the polder model goes beyond the traditional issues that the social dialogue between trade unions and business associations deals with, like wages and labour conditions.

Processes within the social-economic domain are often characterised by high levels of complexity: there are many actors with diverging interests and the chains of causes and consequences of (new) policies are long and unpredictable. These processes can be characterised as ‘wicked problems’, with a lack of normative consensus and a lack of knowledge about causal relations, causes and consequences (see the seminal article of Rittel and Webber, 1973). We perceive ‘negotiated knowledge’ as a specific form of policy analysis that integrates all available knowledge to select policies against a background of diverging interests, perceptions and knowledge. Traditional definitions of policy analysis focus on the application of scientific methods and evidence to select the best policy among a number of alternatives to address a particular policy problem (MacRae and Wilde, 1979; Patton and Sawicki, 1993). Policy analysis as negotiated knowledge acknowledges the absence of final, accepted evidence in the case of wicked problems and diverging interest and perceptions. Rather than through applying scientific methods, methods of argumentation and negotiation are used to develop and select policies to solve social-economic problems. This form of policy analysis has been used in the Dutch polder model for more traditional social-economic issues, like labour market regulation or pension policies, but, in recent years, has even included more general issues like sustainability or global competition.