Time

Nowhere has the Dutch state been given more time than on nitrogen, and nowhere has it had less to show for it. From the 1992 Habitats Directive onwards it was known that deposition and conservation targets would collide. Thirty years of work went into it, across departments, committees and three generations of ministers. In May 2019 the highest administrative court struck down the Nitrogen Approach Programme (PAS), and the country stood, in effect, back at the beginning.¹ The time had been spent. It had not been invested.

Set beside it a file that ran for roughly half as long and was delivered in full: the Room for the River programme. From the near-floods of 1993 and 1995 to the completion of more than thirty interventions, a little over twenty years passed, and at the end of them stood what had been agreed, largely on time and within budget.² The same country, the same administrative culture, the same procedures. The difference lies in what became of the time. This paper concerns the second link in the chain from Nº 00: time, and the difference between spending time and letting it yield a return.³

Horizon, not lead time

The link of time, in this series, is something other than the time a project takes. It is the horizon under which those involved work: the expectation that the file will still exist in twenty years, and that they themselves, institutionally at least, will too. Under that expectation it pays to make trade-offs that only yield later, to lose a fight this year because the outcome is reusable next year, to set down what has been settled. Without it, every trade-off is a cost with no return, and gets deferred to a next round that has no time for it either.

Nº 00 framed this through the Health Insurance Act (Zvw): design time is the period in which the room for judgement is laid down that later makes maintenance possible. Twenty years of debate over the system was no delay there; it was the laying of the foundation. But time accumulates only when successive rounds inherit from one another. Years passing are, in themselves, worth nothing. The Dutch administrative clock runs directly counter to this: cabinet terms grow shorter, civil-service rotation moves faster than the lifespan of the schemes, and every coalition agreement reopens what the last one closed. Anyone working under that clock learns that investing in ripening is irrational. This is not a cultural problem; it is a rational response to a four-year horizon.

Where time yielded a return

Room for the River shows what time does once it is given a form. After the 1995 evacuations the central government chose a direction that went beyond raising dikes: the river would be given room. The key planning decision that took effect in early 2007 fixed two things and left everything else open: the safety objective and the budget were set, while the way each area was filled in was negotiable.² Direction fixed, route adaptive. This gave every area-level process something rare in public administration: the certainty that the file would survive the next elections. Under that certainty, municipalities, water authorities and residents could make trade-offs that took years — from setting back a dike near a village to a high-water channel through farmland — without deferral meaning the end of the money.

The pension system, described in Nº 00, followed the same logic in another guise: thirteen years from committee to agreement to law, made possible by a table that stayed standing while cabinets came and went. In both cases the time was organised: an objective that was fixed, a place where the interim state was preserved, and the expectation among all involved that the conversation would continue. Time yields a return where it is inherited.

Where time evaporated

Nitrogen shows the reverse. The 2015 Nitrogen Approach Programme (PAS) was, at heart, a borrowing scheme: permits were granted against reductions that had yet to materialise.¹ The programme bought time from the future, and the court called in the loan. What followed repeated the pattern at speed: an advisory committee with an authoritative report, emergency legislation, a construction exemption that was struck down in court again in 2022.⁴ Each round bought time from the last and redeemed nothing.

The result after thirty years is a file with no inheritance. No settled trade-offs on which a next attempt can build, no ripened set of instruments, no table where the interim state rests. What has accumulated is case law: the only place the file has built up a memory is the courtroom. That is a law of files of this kind, not a coincidence: where the maker does not inherit, the court eventually does, and that inheritance is more expensive. Nº 07 returns to this mechanism.

The countable substitute

Nº 00 gave every link its countable substitute, and for time that is lead time. The substitute is everywhere: acceleration agendas, delivery task forces, breakthrough approaches, statutory decision deadlines, dashboards tracking per file how long it has sat somewhere. The largest unit of time in public administration has meanwhile become the cabinet term: what cannot be done within this term does not, in policy terms, exist.

Lead time measures the movement of the file. The link of time concerns the ripening of the trade-off, and the two are unconnected: a file can move at record speed and build nothing. More than that, the substitutes work against the link. An acceleration agenda rewards skipping precisely the trade-offs that later make maintenance possible, and the four-yearly reopening counts as decisiveness: every new cabinet shows ambition by setting aside the interim state of the last. So arises a system that is forever in motion and never arrives anywhere, and that can demonstrate that motion, dashboard by dashboard, quarter by quarter.

Organising time

The action perspective for this link consists of two movements and one small discipline.

The first movement: take the end date out of the cabinet clock where the objective demands it. The model exists and has been tested: a statutorily anchored objective, a fund of its own and a function of its own, as the water domain organised it and Nº 01 described. Those three together give a file a horizon that survives elections, and only under that horizon does investing in ripening become rational. The model has been used sparingly, and there is no reason to leave it with water.

The second movement: organise the inheritance. Every project that runs aground or is halted closes with a short, public legacy: what has been settled, what remained open, what has been learned. The successor then begins at the interim state rather than at zero. What that legacy looks like, and why it arises only where there was truly something to lose, is the subject of Nº 04.

And the small discipline, for every organisation, applicable tomorrow: on multi-year files, set down which trade-offs are not ripe this year and when they return. Deferral with a date is scheduling; deferral without a date is the first day of an orphaned design.

The test of this link, in a single question: which part of your file survives a coalition agreement? Whatever fails that question is not multi-year policy but a series of annual editions.

Nitrogen was given thirty years and kept nothing. The river was given twenty and stands there. Time, in government, is not a quantity; it is the question of whether anyone is allowed to inherit. Time that is not inherited is merely expensive.

Footnotes

1. Nitrogen Approach Programme (PAS), in force 1 July 2015; Administrative Jurisdiction Division of the Council of State, rulings of 29 May 2019. ↩ ↩²

2. Floods of 1993 and 1995 with large-scale evacuations in the river region; the Room for the River key planning decision, in effect early 2007; more than thirty measures, largely completed in the years up to 2019. ↩ ↩²

3. Jacob Huibers, Orphaned Design (Nº 00), Statecraft, 2026, statecraft.nl. ↩

4. Advisory College on the Nitrogen Problem (the Remkes Committee), Niet alles kan (Not everything is possible) (2019) and Niet alles kan overal (Not everything is possible everywhere) (2020); annulment of the construction exemption by the Administrative Jurisdiction Division (the Porthos ruling), 2 November 2022. ↩