The Netherlands: The strong civil Society Response

The Dutch HIV/AIDS policy in the past decade can be characterized as having been marked by a civil society response to the problem: with a very strong involvement of private and community organizations. This chapter begins with a general picture of the epidemiological context. It explains the size and development of the overall HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Netherlands from 1980–1995 and describes the social structure and dynamics in terms of groups at risk and sub-epidemics. The chapter analyses the Dutch policy response as “active and liberal”, indicating the explicit policy of non-intervention in individual or group behaviour and provides the general organizational pattern and its structural differentiation. The general pattern and structure of the organizational response can be characterized by the organizational density, the structural differentiation and the development of the number of organizations. The chapter discusses the functional differentiation and discusses the organizational response in policy terms, using a differentiation between top-down, bottom-up and horizontal responses.