Governance of Security in the Netherlands and Belgium

For decades, governments in Western European countries have been confronted with similar problems in a number of policy areas, however the policy solutions created to solve these problems differ extensively. Investigating what various countries have developed and comparing these ideas provides the possibility to learn from one another. One of the issues all Western European countries are struggling with is social unsafety. Whether it is true unsafety or that citizens merely feel unsafe does not matter for the policy. In both cases, citizens expect the government to sort their problems. Local authorities are the first ones called to account on social safety issues. Some are successful, some less so. In this book, experiences with local safety policy in the Netherlands and Belgium are described and compared. Concrete examples of local safety policy are also put in the wider context of criminological and administrative insights that have been developed in the last decades. In a field as dynamic as local safety policy, the experiences in both countries are educational and they contribute to the further development of the local safety policy. Governance of Security in the Netherlands and Belgium is a mutual initiative of the department of Criminal Law and Criminology/the Research Group Social Safety Analysis of the University of Ghent and the department of Public Administration of the Erasmus University Rotterdam.