Samenvatting

In the Netherlands the task of reintegrating partially disabled workers into the labour market, that used to be accomplished by collective institutions, has been redistributed by the government to private actors: those who were the last to employ these workers. It is pointed out that this policy choice implies reusing a medieval legal technique and that its use regenerates typical legitimacy problems. Building on Ostrom’s theory of ‘institutions for collective action’, a historical comparison of the organization of dyke maintenance in the Dutch bog peat areas of the 11th-13th centuries and of these recent policies reveals that both are to be analysed in terms of a ‘double allotment’: duties as to collective tasks are allotted to individual participants in a collectivity by linking them up with a preceding allotment of usage rights, legally formalized in terms of ‘private law’. While neoliberal ideology may account for the direction that recent reintegration policies have taken, it is only in the Netherlands that this legal technique has to such an extent been mobilized. This observation raises questions as to long-term continuities in Dutch policies.