The reputation architecture — Statecraft

Jacob Huibers — Statecraft, April 2026

Context for readers outside the Netherlands

A brief primer is useful before reading the paper proper.

Wethouder, college, raad: the wethouder is the alderman responsible for a portfolio in a Dutch municipal executive (the college), governing alongside an elected raad (council). A council proposal (raadsvoorstel) is the formal document an executive presents to the council for decision.

Bestuursadviseur (governance advisor): a senior staff figure attached to the municipal executive or to a cabinet minister — not a communications role, but a political-administrative advisor with direct access to the mayor, alderman or minister, often with informal channels to coalition party leaders.

Childcare benefits scandal (toeslagenaffaire): between roughly 2005 and 2019, the Dutch Tax Authority unlawfully accused tens of thousands of parents, disproportionately of dual nationality or migrant background, of fraud in claiming childcare benefits. The defining public-administration failure of the past two decades; the Mark Rutte government resigned over it in January 2021.

Senior Public Service (Algemene Bestuursdienst, ABD): the corps of senior civil servants at Dutch central-government level, designed to rotate between ministries.

Schoof cabinet: the Dutch national government in office since 2024.

Council of State (Raad van State) plays an advisory role on legislation in addition to acting as the highest administrative court.

Four versions before the substance returned

In a Dutch centre municipality where I worked as an interim executive, in the second week of my assignment a council proposal came past about a recalibration in the social domain. The substantive department had drafted a first version, with the actual care needs, the figures, the trade-offs they foresaw. The document then went via legal affairs, which tightened it legally, to the communications department, which rewrote it into a story legible for the council, and at the end it came past the executive’s governance advisor. That last figure was not a communications role. He had a political-administrative role, with direct contact between the chief municipal executive, the alderman and the coalition group leaders. He adjusted the tone, and here and there the wording, to give the alderman room for his own emphasis in the council. By the time the document entered the council’s papers stream, the substantive department had dropped out two versions earlier. Not from ill will. No one wanted to suppress the substance. Everyone wanted the story “to flow better”. The sum was that the voice of the people who carry out the work no longer touched the document. The document had become what the executive’s exterior needed in order to be able to defend it.

What I saw there is not an incident. It is what a municipality does when reputation, as an organising layer, has come to lie above the substantive column rather than beside it. An executive organisation in which the substantive department is consulted as the last link with careful corrections is something different from one in which the same department, as the first link, names the problem. In the second case the organisation delivers substance that is then presented outwards. In the first case it delivers presentation onto which substance still has to be fitted. The order is not the same, and the consequences are not the same.

A family of functions

Anyone who speaks of the growth of “communications” at government level has too narrow a view. The reputation architecture this paper addresses is a family of functions that each carry their own designation. At national level it concerns spokespersons, press officers, communications advisors within the directorates of communication, political assistants to ministers, stakeholder managers, and directorates with names such as “ownership advisory” and “governance support”. At municipal level it concerns communications advisors, press officers attached to aldermen, governance advisors to the executive, chiefs-of-staff in larger municipalities, and the strategic advisors to the mayor and aldermen. Some of these functions sit within a directorate of communication and are therefore visible in the official counts. Others sit within staff services, in cabinets, or as personal appointments under a minister, and remain out of sight. Anyone who only looks at the directorates of communication sees one measurable part of a larger whole.

The figures for that one measurable part are nonetheless striking. The communications directorates of the Dutch central ministries counted just over 633 FTE in early 2018. By early 2024 that number had risen to 981.2 FTE, with a first slight decline to 946.6 FTE in 2025 as a result of the savings introduced by the Schoof cabinet. In six years that single sub-population alone grew by more than fifty per cent. Het Financieele Dagblad research from July 2024 showed that just over fifty per cent of central-government personnel now works in so-called overhead functions, against roughly forty-one per cent fifteen years earlier. CPB director Pieter Hasekamp characterised the broader family in June 2024 as the “growing fur collar around ministers and the senior civil service”, in which he placed, alongside communications, the directorates of “ownership advisory” and “governance support”, spokespersons and political assistants.¹ The former government commissioner for information management Arre Zuurmond wrote in July 2024 to the incoming state secretary for digitalisation that executive civil servants are being snowed under by a proliferation of staff departments, naming alongside communications also human resources, legal affairs, procurement and finance.² Pieter Omtzigt three years earlier characterised the sum as “an utterly image-driven circus” and tabled a motion to reverse the growth from six hundred to eight hundred communications professionals under the Rutte III cabinet.³ The motion did not pass, and in the years since the apparatus has continued to grow.

These are observations from people who have worked in different positions inside or close to the apparatus. The observations come from different political directions. What they share is recognition, not analysis. The analysis they invite is that the growth itself is not the problem, but the inversion that comes with it.

At municipal scale

In municipalities the pattern runs in its own way. Figures on the growth of the reputation architecture are available for individual municipalities, not for the collective. What is broadly recognisable is the position of the executive’s governance advisor relative to the substantively responsible director. In municipalities of fifty thousand inhabitants and above, the governance advisor is often a function with heavier mandate than her place in the organisation chart suggests. She participates in the executive meeting, reads council proposals before they go to the council, advises aldermen on the timing of difficult decisions, choreographs alignment with coalition group leaders, and has a fixed seat at the end of the editorial flow. She is often the link between the chief municipal executive and the executive, with her own line to the alderman or the mayor. The director of the social domain, who in column position stands above her in the hierarchy, often only sees at the last moment what she has changed in the document.

Alongside the governance advisor stand the communications advisor, the spokesperson for the alderman or mayor, and in larger municipalities a chief of staff. Their roles overlap at the edges. What binds them is that they operate closer to the political-administrative nerve centre than the directors of the substantive columns, and that their weight in daily decision-making is heavier than their formal position. That is not institutional design. It is what arises when a different signal inside the organisation comes to weigh more heavily than the substantive-administrative one. The signal is media pressure and political vulnerability. The 2024 Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) report on media describes how online intimidation of executives and civil servants has increased, how negativity and conflict disproportionately steer media attention, and how this feeds back into decision-making. In municipalities where an alderman can be electorally punished per dossier on individual blips in local media, attention to what the substance does shifts imperceptibly to attention to what the document does.

This is not a question of poorly executed communications or of poor governance advisory. Many people in these functions are people of integrity and skill, and see better than anyone what is going wrong in an organisation. The problem is not the human in the function. The problem is that the function has come to weigh more heavily than the substantive function it originally served. What once was a supporting layer has become a steering layer.

The inversion

The pattern I am trying to identify is more than growth and more than influence. It is institutional inversion. An executive organisation whose primary task is to serve people, handle dossiers or deliver policy ought to organise its reputation architecture as a derivative of that primary task. What it does determines what it tells. When that connection inverts, what it tells comes to determine what it does. Not because anyone decides this. But because the incentives in the organisation shift such that the defensible story becomes the touchstone, not the actual delivery.

Mark Moore describes in his work on public value three corners that must be in balance: public value, operational capacity, political legitimacy. In the Statecraft publication Navigating versus Planning I described how this triangle in Dutch administrative practice regularly tips when one corner is maximised. The symptom this paper addresses is the structural tilt towards the corner of legitimacy. Not because public value or operational capacity have been written off as concepts. But because the organisation of legitimacy has become its own apparatus, while public value and operational capacity have no comparable apparatus standing opposite. An alderman who meets her governance advisor daily and her director of operations weekly or monthly receives a different image of her priorities than she would receive if both drawers carried equal weight in her diary.

Léon de Caluwé and Hans Vermaak, in their colour theory of change, warned about what happens when the colours compete with one another. Yellow, the colour of politics and power, and blue, the colour of plan and narrative, usually win out over red, green and white. Yellow has power behind it, blue has the best story. Red, green and white — that is, people, learning and self-organisation — receive systematically less room in the political-administrative arena. What the reputation architecture does is precisely to amplify this competition. A governance advisor, a political assistant and a directorate of communication work structurally in yellow and blue, and the growth of those functions forces the organisation around them to organise itself at their pace and in their register. The substantive department that wishes to bring red, green or white to the table no longer finds a comparable structural place.

Erving Goffman described, in his work on self-presentation, the separation between front-stage and back-stage.⁴ Front-stage is the place where the organisation shows itself to its public. Back-stage is the place where the work happens and the actual trade-offs are made. In a healthy organisation back-stage is larger than front-stage, and what happens front-stage is a stylised excerpt of what back-stage actually is. What happens in a dissociated organisation is that front-stage and back-stage exchange places. The meetings in which the document is politically-administratively weighed become the actual decision-making moments. The substantive department, which once back-stage made the trade-offs, now delivers material for what is refined in another room. The environment in which actual decisions fall has moved to a room where the substance no longer sits at the table.

What this does to the other symptoms

In the introductory paper of this series I identified four symptoms that are each developed separately. The reputation architecture is not a stand-alone symptom. It works through onto the other three, and it is useful to make those connections explicit.

The second symptom, reproduction inwards, arises in part because the substantive column no longer has a senior layer that protects its weight. When a director of operations leaves and the governance advisor or communications advisor remains, the junior layer beneath them learns which function in the organisation has continuity and which does not. The centre of gravity of who runs the organisation shifts to whoever stays longest, and that is increasingly someone from the reputation architecture rather than from the substantive column. Mentoring within the substantive column weakens in part because its centre of gravity within the organisation weakens.

The third symptom, the absorbed debt without integration, arises in part because recovery operations are primarily understood as reputation problems before they are understood as substantive problems. A recovery operation announced before the apparatus can carry it is a recovery operation that has been delivered front-stage before back-stage has built it. The childcare benefits scandal here showed the pattern of a decade. Each change of state secretary in the benefits dossier brought a new communication of what the recovery operation was, not always a new substantive advance in its execution. An apparatus of reputation is capable of announcing progress even where the substance lags behind, and that is precisely what typifies a dissociated organisation.

The fourth symptom, performative maturity, is the structure that arises when reputation has crystallised into code and regulation. Governance codes, integrity regulations and compliance architectures are the institutionalised form of precisely the same inversion. What was once meant as an instrument for substantive weight has become its own architecture that produces its own language. The reputation architecture at the level of personnel, and performative maturity at the level of regulation, reinforce one another over the years. The first delivers the apparatus, the second delivers the framework.

What would work

Anyone who, in the Omtzigt tradition, calls for a reduction of the communications apparatus addresses the symptom where it is measurable and leaves it where it remains hidden unaddressed. The numbers in the directorates of communication are a by-product of a deeper design choice, and the governance advisors and political assistants who do not appear in that count are another by-product of the same design choice. Reduction only at the directorates of communication shifts the problem to external hire, to functions that remain in the staff column, or leaves the director of operations with an even tighter mandate against the same media dynamic. What the reputation architecture produces cannot be undone by placing fewer people on one part of the place that produced it. It can be undone by giving the substantive column its weight back.

Three design choices are not in themselves revolutionary, but they cut against current practice. The first is bringing the substantive department back to the start of the editorial trajectory rather than the end. A council proposal or letter to parliament should first be substantively weighed by those who carry out the work, and only then communicatively and through governance advice. Not the other way round. That sounds obvious, but it requires an arrangement that in many current editorial trajectories formally exists and in practice withers away. The second is the separation of the position of governance advisor or political assistant from the position of substantive responsibility. When both roles in fact end up in one hand, no separate weighing between substantive weight and reputation weight is possible any longer. The third is taking the advice of the substantive department seriously as advice that may be set aside with reasons, but may not silently be edited out. Anyone who deviates from a substantive recommendation should do so visibly.

None of these three choices requires new legislation. They require a different weight in daily decision-making. What in the forthcoming book The Direction of Movement is described as the Aiki method is here usable again. The human inclination towards self-protection, in this case the administrative inclination to protect one’s own reputation against media dynamics, is not denied and not forced. It is redirected via a design in which the incentive to protect the substance becomes higher than the incentive to evade it. An executive who places her substantive column back in its proper place does not give up her reputation. She reconnects her reputation to the substance that should be its carrier. In the short term that feels like a loss of room to manoeuvre. In the medium term it returns what the current inversion takes away from her daily: an organisation that can carry its delivery.

For interim management practice

For the interim executive or project lead, the reputation architecture is daily present. She is the person who in the first week is introduced to the executive’s governance advisor and communications advisor, not to the director of operations. She is the person who in her first council proposal experiences what I described in the opening. She is the person who in her final report makes the choice whether to write about the inversion or to leave it unnamed.

Two disciplines help here. The first is, in the Strategic Triangle at every intervention, to test explicitly who sits at the table for public value, who for operational capacity, who for legitimacy. When all three corners are filled with functions that work in the legitimacy column, that is itself the diagnosis. The second is, in the closing phase of the assignment, to secure explicitly what the substantive department has wanted to tell the organisation. What in the forthcoming book is called transfer value is, in the context of this symptom, the recovery of the voice of the substance. An interim assignment closed with a communications message without the substantive department having been able to record its own analysis is an assignment that has served the reputation architecture rather than corrected it.

The open question

The introductory paper closed with the question of what recovery means if the norm towards which recovery directs itself has itself shifted. For the symptom of this paper a related question can be asked. If the organisation of reputation as an architectural layer of the executive state has been institutionalised, with its own jargon, its own career lines, its own training and its own professional associations, can it then be subordinated to the substance again? There is no shortage of critical voices. What is missing is a redesign that inverts the inversion without abolishing the functions of governance advice, communications and spokesperson roles as such.

What I suspect, and cannot prove, is that this recovery must come from the substantive column itself. A reputation architecture that shrinks itself would act against its own incentives, and that is in no bureaucracy the to-be-expected movement. A substantive column that takes back its own weight by re-naming its delivery as its primary work is, by contrast, a movement that can arise within the organisation. For that, a director of operations is needed who delivers her substantive advice no longer at the end of the editorial flow but at the beginning, and a chief municipal executive or secretary-general who supports her in this. That is not a revolution. It is a reorientation of where the centre of gravity of the organisation lies. In the short term it asks more discomfort of everyone at the table. In the long term it produces an organisation that can connect its reputation to its work again, rather than the other way round.

Colophon

“The reputation architecture” is the first symptom paper in the Statecraft series Dissociated Organisations. The series builds on Navigating versus Planning, the paper on vacation real estate and the invisible policy, the paper on scarcity, and the architecture of silence. The introductory paper Dissociated Organisations appeared in April 2026.

Statecraft is the platform of Jacob Huibers for strategic reflection on public-service delivery. The content connects to the forthcoming book The Direction of Movement: Interim Management in the Public Sector (forthcoming autumn 2026).

Response and counter-argument via Statecraft.

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 for municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants and for regional inter-municipal partnerships.

Pieter Hasekamp, “After the budgetary cheese-slicer, choices remain necessary” (orig. Dutch), Het Financieele Dagblad, 14 June 2024 / cpb.nl, 14 June 2024. The full formulation expressly names “Directorates such as ‘ownership advisory’ or ‘governance support’, spokespersons and political assistants” as elements of the fur collar. ↩
Arre Zuurmond, letter to state secretary Z. Szabó, 11 July 2024, published via rcihh.nl and open-overheid.nl. Zuurmond’s final report, Straight through the Order (April 2025), develops this observation further. ↩
Pieter Omtzigt, in plenary debate of the General Political Considerations, Tweede Kamer (House of Representatives), 23 September 2021. The motion to reverse the growth (Kamerstuk 35925, in connection with the General Considerations) did not gain a majority. Subsequent reporting in Adformatie and Binnenlands Bestuur, among others. ↩
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Doubleday, 1959. The front-stage / back-stage distinction is developed in chapter 3, “Regions and Region Behavior”. ↩