Getting the ball rolling: de bottom-up organisatie van de versterking aanpak ondermijnende criminaliteit

To strengthen the approach to tackle serious and organized crime in the Netherlands, the Dutch government made additional financial resources available in the form of € 100 million incidentally and a structural reinforcement of € 10 million per year between 2019 and 2022. The funding was allocated through a bottom-up call for projects. Projects with a specific focus on drug-related crime, experimenting with new forms of governance, and projects stimulating public-private partnerships were eligible to apply for funding. In this way, the government aimed at stimulating a broad societal movement and increase resilience against serious and organized crime. This article reports the findings of an ongoing project that evaluates the implementation process of these initiatives and aims to identify best, good, and bad practices and successful collaborations between a wide variety of public and private partners. This project uses an action research approach which allows for providing feedback on the implementation process, while observing what happens in practice.