The Outsourced Pothole — Statecraft

Statecraft Longread · Jacob Huibers

In its first hundred days New York City’s administration had more than a hundred thousand potholes in roads and pavements filled, on the busiest days over seven thousand at once. Citizens needed to read no budget or policy memo to see the effectiveness. In the evening the warm asphalt smouldered in the lamplight.¹ The operation acquired a name, the pothole blitz, and the accompanying social media generated hundreds of thousands of likes within days.

The image is seductive, and in recent months it has been offered in the Netherlands too as a lesson: government that does not talk but acts, that organises connection and a sense of community by delivering visibly.² The seduction lies in the suggestion that it is about atmosphere, about lightness, about a register the left ought to claim for itself. But whoever fills the pothole is not doing atmosphere. He commands an apparatus of execution. The achievement in the New York example is not the cheerful post but the authority over thousands of road workers, equipment and planning that lies behind it. The same holds for the lottery example cited in the same argument: the cheerful retro posters at the bus shelters are the residue of months of negotiation in which the mayor prised a concession from the FIFA president. The visible gesture is the form. The power beneath it is the substance.

That distinction is not cosmetic. Whoever mistakes the gesture for the power copies the wrong part. A Dutch alderman who reads this and has posters printed without conducting the negotiation produces precisely what this corpus elsewhere names form-laundering: the outward features of an achievement without the achievement itself. The question the New York example raises is therefore not whether Dutch officials should take to the street more often. The question is whether they can still fill the pothole at all, and on whose authority.

The lever the authors do not see

There is one sentence in the argument worth enlarging, and it is the sentence the authors themselves let fall in passing. Citizens needed to read no budget to see the effectiveness. That is legitimacy mediated not by representation, communication or participation, but by sensorily verifiable delivery. The citizen checks the government with his own eyes, not through the ballot, the press conference or the consultation evening.

This connects directly to a proposition from The Direction of the Movement and to its methodical elaboration in The Four Triangles of Moore. Mark Moore’s Strategic Triangle distinguishes three corners that must be in balance: public value, operational capacity, political legitimacy.³ In an administrative configuration that is exhausted, in which the citizen no longer believes the appearance of functioning prudence, operational capacity is the usable lever. Not because it is the most important corner, but because it is the only one where concrete intervention is possible without first having to formulate an ideological consensus. Visible results generate the feedback that is missing in the exhausted state, and a functioning execution articulates, in its operation, what public value actually is, better than any policy vision.⁴

Deliverism is the popular name for that thesis. The New York example provides, against the authors’ intention, empirical support for it. They sell it as a politics of pleasure, as red in the colours of change, as motivation and community. What they show is yellow and blue: power over one’s own apparatus, deployed by plan and made visible. The diagnosis is right, the interpretation is not. And it is precisely that mistaken interpretation that makes it inimitable, because it moves the mechanism to the register in which it does not work.

Who fills the pothole in the Netherlands?

Here the real Dutch question begins, and the argument does not pose it. Which municipality can still fill a hundred thousand potholes today, and who gives the order to do so?

Visible execution has, in the Dutch system, largely been organised away. Management of public space, waste collection, greenery, roads, street lighting: a considerable part of it has been placed with affiliated bodies, joint arrangements (statutory inter-municipal bodies), hived-off agencies and tendered contracts with their own lead times, performance specifications and penalty clauses. The Netherlands now counts more than four hundred joint arrangements with a combined budget of over thirteen billion euros; at a municipality like Nijmegen forty per cent of the budget runs through regional bodies.⁵ The Council for Public Administration (ROB) spoke in this connection of “Dreamland or No-man’s-land” and found that task, execution, administrative capacity, responsibilities, finances and democratic legitimacy are no longer in balance. The democratic legitimacy at that level, in the sharper formulation from the research literature, is structurally deficient.⁶

The result is a precise form of dissociation: one bearer, two registers, no correction mechanism. The municipal executive is politically answerable for a delivery it does not govern. The alderman is questioned in the council on the state of the pavement, while the pavement is managed by an organisation placed at arm’s length, with its own board on which the same alderman holds one of seven votes. Answerability is singular, control is plural and diluted. That is not the result of individual failure. It is the structure that produces it.

I have seen that mechanism at close quarters in the physical domain. In an assignment at a municipality of around a hundred thousand inhabitants the executive was politically fully responsible for the quality of public space, while its maintenance was divided across a regional execution organisation, a multi-year tendered roads contract and an in-house team that budget cuts had reduced by half. When the council asked for a visible improvement, it turned out that none of the three could, at short notice and on its own authority, deliver what was asked. The execution organisation had its own planning with its own administrative logic. The contract left no room for a catch-up effort without additional work and renegotiation. The in-house team was too small. What remained as room for manoeuvre for the executive was not the pothole, but the conversation about the pothole.

The participation that replaces the pothole

And with that the predictable displacement behaviour is named. Whoever cannot fill a pothole organises a participation process.

This is not a cynical observation but a mechanical one. Administrative energy seeks the channel of least resistance. When the channel of direct delivery has silted up, the energy shifts to the channel still open: that of communication, consultation, the neighbourhood evening, the residents’ initiative, the quality boost on paper. The participation industry is, on this reading, not the cause of administrative inertia but the affective compensation for lost execution power. It supplies the form of involvement where the power to change something has been organised away. Thijs Homan once called the organisations that communicate change outwardly while internally everything stays the same decoupling paradises.⁷ Execution organised away produces that decoupling not incidentally but structurally: the arena in which public space is discussed is decoupled from the arena in which public space is actually maintained.

A countability trap is also at work here. A participation process is countable. It produces participant numbers, turnout percentages, minutes, satisfaction scores and photographs. Filling a pothole produces a filled pothole, and nothing else that lends itself easily to a progress report. The system optimises predictably for the remedy that is visible in its own record-keeping, not for the remedy that is visible in the street. The remedy that is countable crowds out the remedy that is effective.

Deliverism the Dutch way, and who takes the credit

The argument itself points to a Dutch example that supposedly illustrates deliverism: the rail pass with which travellers can travel unlimited off-peak and at weekends this summer for forty-nine euros a month, presented as an initiative of the party now called Progressief Nederland.⁸ The example is usable, but the attribution in particular deserves correction, and that correction is itself the point.

The pass, formally the Netherlands Off-Peak Rail pass, is a central-government product. It is funded from the emergency package for high energy and fuel prices, estimated at one hundred and eighteen million euros, announced by the state secretary and carried out by the Dutch Railways (NS) by temporarily reducing the price of an existing product.⁹ Its political origin is an adopted parliamentary motion. Delivery runs through central government and the carrier. By mid-July two hundred and seventy thousand travellers had taken out the pass, of whom eighty thousand had not previously held one.¹⁰ A party can claim the political credit for the motion. The bearer of the delivery lies elsewhere.

That is precisely the asymmetry that characterises deliverism in a decentralised system placed at arm’s length. The visibility premium is politically appropriable by whoever announces the gesture, while the operational capacity that makes the gesture possible sits with another body. Whoever has the pothole filled by an affiliated body, or the ticket delivered by NS, reaps the visibility without possessing the control. As long as things go well that is an advantage. The moment things go wrong, answerability is singular and the power to steer is absent. That is not a politics of pleasure. It is a politics of borrowed delivery.

The anchoring question the image cannot withstand

There remains the heaviest test, and it is the test The Direction of the Movement applies as its primary measure: not what stands on the day of the gesture, but what still stands when no one thinks of it any more.

A blitz is by definition incidental. A hundred thousand potholes in a hundred days says nothing about the multi-year maintenance provision that keeps the roads in condition. The Dutch equivalent is familiar: the incidental catch-up on deferred maintenance, funded from a one-off injection, while the structural management budget stays too low, followed by renewed neglect as soon as political attention shifts. Deliverism moreover has a built-in inflation. The visibility premium is highest at the first gesture and thereafter demands ever larger gestures to achieve the same effect. What depends on a single official and his first hundred days is not anchored. It is a peak, not a provision.

This is not an objection to the idea. It is the sharpest test one can put to it, and the test immediately yields the course of action. The question for a Dutch executive is not which gestures it should make, but which visible deliveries it can, within a single term of office, anchor on its own authority, including the structural provision that keeps them in place. Concretely, that means three things at once. Reclaiming control over the delivery on which one is politically judged, or explicitly accepting and organising the steering role where reclaiming is not possible. Anchoring the maintenance provision in the budget for the long term, not as an incidental injection but as a structural line item that survives a change of wind. And distinguishing the visibility that accompanies a supported improvement from the visibility that replaces it. The first is legitimacy resting on delivery. The second is the bus-shelter poster without the negotiation.

The citizen who sees the warm asphalt smouldering in the lamplight checks his government without intermediary. That is the promise of deliverism, and it is real. But the pothole that is filled today by an organisation at arm’s length, with money that runs out next year, is a pothole again tomorrow. The question is not whether the administration delivers visibly. The question is whether it still owns the delivery.

Colophon

This longread is a publication of Statecraft, the publishing practice of Jacob Huibers within House of Viridian. Statecraft analyses the intersection of administrative practice, organisational change and public-sector execution. The analysis builds on The Direction of the Movement: Interim Management in the Public Sector (manuscript in preparation) and on the methodical note The Four Triangles of Moore.

Responses and counter-arguments via Statecraft.nl.

Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years of experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and quartermaster at municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants, and at inter-municipal collaborative bodies across the social and physical domains. Statecraft is his platform for strategic reflection on public-sector execution, pillar IV of House of Viridian.

The figures on the pothole blitz and the lottery example as cited in the opinion article by Jacob Boersema and Madeleijn van den Nieuwenhuizen, “Radicaal-rechts versla je met een ‘politiek van plezier’” (“You beat the radical right with a ‘politics of pleasure’”), NRC, 3 July 2026. ↩
Boersema and Van den Nieuwenhuizen (2026), who characterise this approach as “deliverism” or “pothole politics”, rendered in Dutch as niet lullen maar poetsen (“less talk, more graft”). ↩
Moore, M.H. (1995). Creating Public Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ↩
Statecraft, The Four Triangles of Moore (method, 2026), §09, on the lever question in the exhausted configuration. ↩
BZK (Ministry of the Interior) (2024), Staat van het Bestuur 2024 (“State of Public Administration 2024”); Regioatlas (overview of joint arrangements). See also Investico and De Groene Amsterdammer (2022) on budget overruns at joint arrangements. ↩
Council for Public Administration (ROB) (2015), Droomland of Niemandsland? Uitgangspunten voor het besturen van regio’s (“Dreamland or No-man’s-land? Principles for governing regions”). The Hague: ROB. The characterisation that democratic legitimacy at the regional level is “always deficient” is drawn from the research literature on extended local government. ↩
Homan, T. (2005). Organisatiedynamica: Theorie en praktijk van organisatieverandering (“Organisational Dynamics”). The Hague: Academic Service. ↩
GroenLinks and PvdA merged on 13 June 2026 into Progressief Nederland, informally PRO. The party is named as the initiator of the pass in the cited article. ↩
Central Government (2026), “‘Nederland Dal Vrij Trein’ start op 15 juni”; the measure is funded from the emergency package for high energy and fuel prices, estimated at approximately €118 million, and carried out by temporarily reducing the price of the existing NS Flex Dal Vrij product. Its political origin is the adopted motion of Klaver and others. ↩
NS figures, as at 15 July 2026: approximately 270,000 passes taken out, of which approximately 80,000 new subscribers. ↩