What I do
I work as an interim manager. Over the past twenty years I have served as cluster manager, cluster director, and quartermaster for Dutch municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants, and for inter-municipal collaborative bodies. Assignments typically run through a board or executive directorate, at the intersection where governance questions, organisational change, and operational execution meet.
The recurring pattern is that I am asked to come in where what has been tried is not yet working. A collaboration that doesn't take. A dossier that doesn't move. A team that has lost its own bearings. What I do there is not deliver a solution but get the substantive work moving again — by sharpening the question, bringing the substance back to the table, and recalibrating the design of the work to what execution actually demands.
Why a Dutch site reaches you in English
Statecraft examines the Dutch administrative state, but it treats the Netherlands as a case, not as the subject. The Netherlands is a small, dense, post-consensus democracy where the symptoms of late-modern public administration arrive early and visibly. What surfaces here applies elsewhere — and where an argument generalises beyond the Dutch case, the paper is published in English alongside the Dutch source. Both versions carry cross-references in their Article schema for canonical attribution across languages.
The international vantage point is not incidental: it is part of the method. I write from Lisbon, under House of Viridian OÜ in Estonia. The distance from The Hague is deliberate. Working from inside Dutch institutions for twenty years and writing about them from outside their immediate pull is what produces a usable reading of them.
What Statecraft is
Statecraft is the pillar within House of Viridian where that experience is made publicly accessible. It is not a newsletter and it is not a marketing channel for my interim assignments. It is a substantive opening to what stays structurally unnamed in Dutch public administration: how institutional architecture shapes the judgement of those who do the work.
The central diagnosis is "dissociated organisations": the hypothesis that the Dutch executive state suffers not from neglect, as the dominant frame holds, but from dissociation at the system level — not within any single organisation, but in the architecture that carries organisations and links them to one another. The hypothesis is developed across three coherent series. Series I — Dissociated Organisations (ten papers) describes the pattern from inside the apparatus: four symptoms that prevent evident error from landing. Series II — Reverberation (eight papers) describes how that same institutional condition reaches society — as physical scarcity that is no scarcity, as ownership shifts no one chose, as a rule of law that works formally and becomes materially unreachable for those without means. Series III — Notes from Within (seven papers plus glossary) closes the triptych: field observations on six patterns of cognitive distortion, legible in the material things citizens inhabit, eat and use. Standalone publications sit alongside, applying the same vocabulary to specific dossiers.
The book
I am writing a book: De Richting van de Beweging — Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector ("The Direction of Movement — Interim Management in the Public Sector"). The introductory paper of Series I returns inside the book as the bridge between Part I (the Movement) and Part II (the Method) — the developmental backdrop without which the intervention method does not fully read. The book appears in Dutch first; an English edition is under consideration but not committed. Anyone who wants to be informed when it appears can subscribe to publication notifications.
How to get in touch
Statecraft has no comment section. It has a thinking practice. Three kinds of response are welcome: sharp disagreement with a paper, your own dossiers that you suspect show the same pattern, and an interest in co-writing a follow-up. Anything outside that is welcome too — an inquiry about an assignment, a conversation, something unexpected. Strong contributions return, by mutual agreement, as a standalone piece or as co-authorship.
Writing happens via the contact form — no email address is exposed on the site, to keep scrapers out. Replies normally arrive within 48 hours. For publication notifications: Keep me posted.
Background
I studied climate science (Utrecht/Southampton) and law (Leiden), and after graduating worked in line responsibility at Dutch executive agencies and municipalities, later moving into interim roles. My daily work plays out where governance decisions and operational practice meet — a zone systematically under-represented in the Dutch public debate about government. Statecraft is an attempt to give that zone a register: not as outside judgement, but as a way of seeing that the work itself can carry.