The integration of immigrants is an intractable policy controversy in Dutch politics: the Blok Committee was established by Parliament to offer a resolution. However, its evaluation study ‘Building Bridges’, itself became controversial. This paper asks: Why did the policy evaluation of the Blok Committee become so fiercely contested? We argue that the debate on immigrant integration can be characterized by frame-conflict: there were fundamental differences in how immigrant integration was defined and normatively interpreted by actors. The resolution of such ill-structured problems requires the critical articulation of multiple and conflicting frames. In situations of intractable policy controversies, policy evaluation should reach beyond mere technical and contextual levels to include systemic and ideological discourse. Policy evaluation can thereby focus more on utilization and contribute to the resolution of intractable policy controversies by building bridges among conflicting frames.

Private arrangements are framed by a set of institutional rules, either public policies or property rights that actors activate in order to defend their positions. This is particularly visible in the field of the environment where human pressure is increasing scarcity and generating rivalries between competing users. How do rules intervene in the resolution of rivalries? I suggest that users activate rules to assert their rights against their rivals and find out a solution to the rivalry. Three hypotheses follow: the owner uses his property rights; the non-owner activates a public policy that acknowledges him as the final beneficiary; and the owner activates a public policy if he cannot exclude the rival from his property. The empirical test, carried out on four cases of local water rivalries in Belgium and Switzerland, validates these hypotheses and shows that public policies are more frequently activated than is initially expected.

The EMU fiscal adjustment paths of the four Southern Europe members (Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal – SE-4) vary along two dimensions: (a) cross-temporal pre- and post-EMU accession and (b) cross-country. We account for the cross-temporal variation by distinguishing between the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ EMU conditionality of the pre- and post-accession stage. External constraints in the form of the Maastricht eligibility criteria constituted a significant common ‘push’ factor in the fiscal stabilization process of EMU candidate countries throughout the 1990s. However, their power does not necessarily lead to fiscal sustainability as demonstrated by the post-accession budgetary outlook of the SE-4. We account for the cross-country variation by introducing additional ‘pull’ factors related to the reform content, context and capability, such as unemployment, the level of social concertation, and government effectiveness. Only in cases where such factors were at work did governments engage in structural reforms to consolidate public finances instead of the less controversial path of macroeconomic policy reform.