With this letter we want to express our support for the ‘Uitvoeringsbrigade’. With our institute DRIFT, Erasmus University Rotterdam, we have been advancing transition theory and practices in a variety of domains, ranging from the energy transition to health care and social services. We have been working with the initiators of the Uitvoeringsbrigade for close to ten years and have found them to be pioneering social entrepreneurs in developing new strategies, tools and methods to address complex social issues.
The approach developed breaks radically with the mostly dominant institutional, fragmented and system oriented approaches in the social domain. The dominant approaches are characterized by an emphasis on efficient problem-solving, but have in this way developed into a system on its own incapable of preventing complex and persistent social problems and many organisations and policy departments in a way even became dependent upon the existence of such problems for their existence.
The approach developed by the Uitvoeringsbrigade builds upon years of experimentation with radically innovative experiments. These include more human centered support, close interaction between client and professional and new systems for monitoring, learning and improvement. By now, they are able to combine these elements in an innovative way providing a completely new systemic approach to addressing social problems in an effective, proactive and preventive way.
Prof. dr. D. A. Loorbach – DRIFT Dutch Research Institute for Transitions – Erasmus University