The art of limit-setting

Jacob Huibers — Statecraft, April 2026

Context for readers outside the Netherlands

A brief primer is useful before reading the paper proper.

Grid congestion (netcongestie) is the inability of the Dutch electricity grid to accept new connections, both for production (solar, wind) and for consumption (housing, industry). It is the central infrastructure crisis of mid-2020s Dutch policy and is expected to remain unresolvable at national level for at least a decade.

Nitrogen crisis (stikstof) refers to the Dutch implementation of the European Habitats Directive in protected nature areas, which since a 2019 Council of State ruling has constrained construction, agriculture and infrastructure development across the country.

The Didam doctrine is a 2021 ruling of the Dutch Supreme Court establishing that municipalities must give equal opportunity and apply transparent allocation criteria when selling public land. The doctrine is widely expected to extend to subsidies, permits and grid connections, with broad implications for how public goods are distributed.

Wmo (Wet maatschappelijke ondersteuning) is the Social Support Act, the Dutch legal framework under which municipalities provide care and support services to residents who cannot manage independently — including domestic help, transport and assistive devices.

The “ravine year” (ravijnjaar) refers to the steep drop in central-government funding for Dutch municipalities in 2026 due to a structural shift in the Municipal Fund formula. It has reshaped budgetary expectations across local government.

Wethouder, college, raad: the wethouder is the alderman responsible for a portfolio in a municipal executive (the college), governing alongside an elected raad (council).

Inter-municipal partnerships (gemeenschappelijke regelingen) are joint arrangements through which municipalities deliver tasks they cannot carry alone — youth care, regional health, environmental enforcement and many more. A typical municipality participates in eight to ten of them.

The municipality that cannot do anything any more

In the spring of 2026, an alderman in a Utrecht-province municipality has four letters on his desk. The grid operator notifies him that no new electricity connections will be possible for the foreseeable future. The province informs him that nitrogen capacity for the planned business park is unavailable. The youth-care region reports a multi-year deficit which the municipality must pre-finance. The auditor reminds him of the Didam doctrine that applies to land allocation, and may shortly apply to subsidies as well. The council programme is eighteen months old and overtaken on each of the four points.

What is at play in this municipality is not unusual. It is the recognisable pattern of public governance in the second quarter of this century. Scarcity in resources, space, capacity, permitting — often simultaneously and often mutually reinforcing. This paper builds on an earlier Statecraft publication on how this scarcity arises: not as a deliberate choice, but as the sum of separate regulatory signals which, through asymmetric impact, lead to predictable but unintended outcomes. The fiscal treatment of vacation homes, the Habitats Directive designations of fragmented nature areas, the arbitrage routes between ownership structures: each of them implicit choices with major consequences.

This paper takes the other side. Given the legacy of implicit choices, how do you act as an executive or interim manager within what you did not cause and cannot resolve alone? The thesis is simple. Dutch public administration has spent three generations learning to negotiate distribution and to plan investments. It lacks the language and action repertoire for limit-setting. This paper organises that repertoire in four modes.

What scarcity makes different

Three observations sharpen the problem.

First, and this is the direct bridge to the previous paper: scarcity in the public domain is rarely absolute. It is usually the residue of earlier choices that seemed sensible at the time of decision but proved unsustainable on closer examination. That has practical consequences. Anyone acting as an executive or manager operates within an inheritance that cannot be corrected at municipal level alone. The design fault lies elsewhere; the consequences land on you.

Second, scarcity is not sectoral but systemic. The municipality without a youth-care budget also has no staff to push through the savings. It also has no grid capacity for the new school. It also has no nitrogen room for the business park that would create work. The four letters on the alderman’s desk are no coincidence. They reinforce one another because they all flow from the same overarching design and growth logic.

Third, and perhaps the hardest of the three, the electoral story has not yet absorbed scarcity. An executive who names limit-setting is judged for lack of ambition. One who hides it is judged for dishonesty. That is a legitimacy problem layered on top of the allocation problem.

In Hans Vermaak’s terms: these are intractable problems where second-order learning is necessary. First-order learning means doing better what you already did. Second-order learning means questioning which problem you are actually trying to solve. The four modes below are all ways of bringing that second-order learning into administrative practice.

Redefining the norm

The first action repertoire begins with Mark Moore’s sharpest question: not what the organisation produces, but what the citizen experiences. Between those two lies a frequently unused space.

When I was responsible for cuts in public-space management in Rotterdam in the early 2000s, I learned the difference between flat lawn and rough grass. Flat lawn requires weekly mowing, a fine-cut tractor and a crew to trim the edges. Rough grass requires two cuts a year and nothing more. Between the two lies a factor in maintenance costs that every maintenance budget knows. When we systematically looked at where this difference was actually noticeable to residents, the answer was: only in the first few metres from kerb or path. What lies further away is registered by the eye uniformly as green. By converting everything more than three metres from the edge to rough grass, we saved over half a million euros a year without any noticeable decline in quality of life. No one complained, because no one saw the difference.

The principle transfers. With youth-care gatekeepers: which triage step adds value and which is bureaucratic duplication. With permitting: which response times are publicly noticeable and which only prevent reproach in council debates. With Wmo determinations: which level of detail helps the client and which mainly serves the accountability stream.

Vermaak points out, in his work on diagnostic intervening, that the framing of the question is often the most important intervention in itself. Anyone who redefines the norm is not engaging in symptom relief but is changing what counts as the problem. That requires administrative courage: you abandon the claim that everything that once became a norm must remain a norm. It also requires analytical sharpness: you must be able to distinguish where the norm serves and where it mainly survives.

Shifting the scale

The second mode does not turn on the norm but on the system. When a problem is unsolvable at one scale, it can be tractable at another. The reverse is also true: what works locally sometimes falls apart regionally or nationally.

A good example comes from Haarlemmermeer. When I was involved there as cluster manager for spatial development, economy and sustainability, the Schiphol Area Development Company developed a microgrid approach on a number of business parks with municipal support. The rationale is straightforward. Grid congestion is unsolvable at national level for at least the next decade. At the level of a single business park, balancing supply and demand is in fact possible: solar production from a logistics building feeds the cooling of the building next door, a neighbourhood battery absorbs peaks, local control prevents everyone drawing power at once. The congestion does not disappear, but it is handled at a different scale where instruments are available. Strikingly, this example has not been widely followed, even though it is precisely the type of solution that relieves the central debate.

The same logic applies elsewhere. Nitrogen-deposition banks at area level instead of individual notifications. Regional specialised youth-care provisions that individual municipalities can no longer carry. Collective heating solutions at neighbourhood level instead of individual heat pumps that strain the grid. In each of these cases the administrative art lies in finding the scale at which the problem is in fact solvable, and moving decision-making and ownership to that level.

This connects to white-style thinking in De Caluwé and Vermaak’s colour theory of change: not central control but space for self-organisation within frameworks. But it is not pure white. Shifting the scale initially requires substantial yellow and blue interventions to set the frameworks within which local solutions can emerge. It is a layered change repertoire rather than a single-colour approach.

Allocating transparently

When norm and scale are fixed, the question of who and who not remains. This is the third mode, and the one in which Dutch administrative practice most visibly falls short.

The Didam case law made explicit, for land allocation, what already followed from the general principles of good administration: equal opportunity, room for competition, motivated choices. The doctrine will extend to subsidies, permits and grid connections. What now still runs informally on the basis of historical rights or civil-service prioritisation must, within the foreseeable future, be defensible in public law.

This requires explicit prioritisation frameworks that can withstand scrutiny. No hidden preferences, no historically grown rights, but motivated choices on the basis of public value. For grid connections this can mean: housing for target groups, public real estate, employment generators and the sustainability retrofit of existing buildings take priority over discretionary industrial expansion, with explicit weighting between those categories. For nitrogen capacity: prioritising projects with demonstrable public benefit over projects with purely private benefit. For youth care: clear triage based on safety and developmental prospect, not on order of application.

The discomfort here is that explicit choices also have explicit losers. That is precisely why many municipal executives now find themselves stuck: they want to choose but dare not, because the framework is missing and the rejected party is always louder than the favoured one. The rhetoric of scarcity-without-choices is no longer sustainable. Whoever does not choose, chooses implicitly, and that is precisely what the Didam doctrine renders impermissible.

This touches Moore’s legitimacy corner in its purest form. Legitimacy does not arise by serving everyone equally, but by underpinning the choices you make in a traceable way. A municipal executive that says “I had to choose, and here is why I chose this” loses less support than one that says “we are doing our best for everyone” while waiting times for some applications stretch to infinity.

Buying time without letting go

The fourth mode is the most underappreciated: the deliberate, transparent postponement as a legitimate administrative act.

When state secretary De Bat in spring 2026 named the connection moratorium in fifteen Utrecht-province municipalities a “temporary pause”, he was dismissed in the media as capitulating. That is a short-sighted reading. Administratively, a temporary pause is a legitimate intervention when three conditions are met: a definitive decision now would inflict irreversible damage, better information or capacity can become available within a reasonable term, and the intervening period is explicitly used to create those conditions. The half-yearly review De Bat has built in satisfies the third condition. Whether the intervening time is in fact used to build capacity is the test that can be made in six months.

The difference between buying time and postponement-as-flight lies in transparency. Anyone who explicitly says: “I am not taking a decision now, because the information is inadequate, and I am taking these steps in order to be able to decide in six months”, acts defensibly. Anyone who manoeuvres verbally to evade a decision does not.

This connects to Karl Weick’s sensemaking perspective: in an ambiguous situation you gain insight by acting, not by analysing endlessly. Buying time is then not passivity but activated postponement, with actions that give direction during the process. Vermaak’s notion of “muddling forward” sits closely alongside: not waiting for the complete plan, but staying in motion within uncertainty, looking back carefully to course-correct.

The four modes in relation

The modes can be ordered along two axes. Vertically: does the intervention stay within the existing system or does it open the system? Horizontally: superficial or deep in its effect? Redefining the norm is a deep intervention within the existing system. Shifting the scale opens the system but goes more superficially into the individual regulatory layer. Allocating transparently stays within the system but mainly affects the allocation procedure, not the allocative outcomes themselves. Buying time is the most minimal intervention but opens space for all the other three.

In practice the modes occur in combination. A municipality that redefines the norm for green-space management probably also uses buying time to discuss the consequences with residents. A region that shifts the scale for youth care must, within that scale, allocate transparently. The four modes are not mutually exclusive strategies but instruments that combine into an action repertoire.

What this asks of executives and interim managers

Three implications.

For executives, first: the electoral story must be about choosing, not about wanting everything at once. That requires political courage of a kind which the current media environment severely punishes. Vermaak points out, in his work, that second-order change only succeeds when executives themselves dare to open up the framing of the question, rather than offering only solutions within the existing frame. That is the hardest layer, because it touches the executive’s own positioning.

For interim managers, second: this is precisely the type of question on which public-sector interim management is distinctive. The interim manager arrives without a history, can name limit-setting without immediately being electorally punished, and can organise the administrative courage which the system itself struggles to produce. Moore’s Strategic Triangle then becomes a daily compass: which public value to prioritise, which legitimacy to organise, which capacity to deploy, and at every tension to ask whether the three corners are in balance.

For the relationship between the two, third: limit-setting is not a management technique but a political-administrative act. The interim manager can supply the framework, can sharpen the choices, can work out alternatives, but the choice itself belongs to the executive who is electorally accountable for it. Maintaining that distinction prevents both technocratisation and the passing on of responsibility.

An invitation

This paper is the second part of a diptych. The first paper diagnosed how scarcity and market shifts arise without anyone explicitly choosing them. This paper organises the action repertoire that fits that legacy. Together they sketch what Statecraft as a thinking practice seeks to add to Dutch administrative vocabulary: sharp diagnosis, followed by workable room for action.

A third paper presses for attention: how to keep your centre as an executive or interim manager when you are structurally under pressure to promise more than limit-setting allows. That is where the personal layer of the work that The Direction of Movement develops comes to ground.

The questions that remain open after this paper. Which mode fits which question, and how do you learn that distinction without first having to fail? Which combination of modes works in which political arena, and which combinations reinforce each other versus which neutralise each other? How do you develop, in an organisation, the administrative space in which limit-setting becomes ordinary language rather than capitulation jargon? Such questions cannot be answered abstractly. They call for a community of practising executives and interim managers who share experience, recognise patterns, and refine the repertoire as they go.

Limit-setting is not the end of administrative capacity. It is the beginning of precision.

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This paper is part of Statecraft, a series of explorations on leadership, change and public value in complex environments. It appears in connection with the earlier paper on implicit choices in Dutch policy, and with the forthcoming book The Direction of Movement: Interim Management in the Public Sector*.*

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Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years’ experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and project lead at municipalities ranging from 50,000 to 212,000 inhabitants. This paper builds on assignments in Rotterdam, Haarlemmermeer and regional youth care, among others, and on the work of Mark Moore, Hans Vermaak, Léon de Caluwé and Karl Weick.