Municipal Waste Management in Norway and the Netherlands: From In-House Provision to Inter-Municipal Cooperation

Abstract

The organization of local public services is assumed to have gone through three developmental stages, from originally being organized in-house, to the New Public Management (NPM) epoch, to the contemporary period of post-NPM and re-municipalization. On the basis of Van Thiel’s typology of agencies we analyze how the emergence of organizational forms has occurred in the field of waste management in Norway and the Netherlands. We find that the trajectory of reform in both countries does not match the three developmental stages. Moreover, there are significant differences in the organization of waste management in the two countries in these stages. Additionally, in spite of differences in terms of crisis experience, we find common features such as increasing agentification, a strong tendency towards “inter-municipalization,” and no convincing signs of re-municipalization.