As the state retracts further in the Netherlands, the role of civil society increases. Only now the impact becomes visible due to changing arrangements in the social domain. Since enormous cuts in the welfare budgets have been implemented; creative innovations by civil initiatives are much needed to …

This final paper focuses on municipal international cooperation (MIC) with developing nations. MIC can be defined as international decentralised cooperation or the term "town twinning" (Boven, 2007, "what is town twinning" section). It is an agreement between two or more municipalities from different …