Professional Competences for Effectively Navigating Conflicting Interests in Managing Public Space: A Dutch Delphi Study

Public space management in the Netherlands is traditionally grounded in a rational-technical governance paradigm that prioritizes technical standards, performance indicators, and efficiency-oriented procedures to ensure clean, safe, and functional public spaces. However, increasing citizen participation, intensifying spatial pressures, and the diversification of stakeholder claims have transformed public space into a complex governance arena with multiple actors with potentially conflicting interests. Although governance literature increasingly recognizes the shift toward participatory and networked forms of public management, it provides limited empirical insight into the professional competences of public space managers required to navigate conflicting interests in everyday public space use. We address this gap by identifying the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required for contemporary public space management using a 2- round Delphi study among Dutch public space management professionals (round 1, n = 47; round 2, n = 29) and online workshop (n = 31). The results show agreement on 10 core competences by the public managers: five knowledge competences (policy and legal insight; political and governance process; administrative processes; decision-making scope; users’ needs), one skill competence (collaboration) and four attitude competences (communication; reliability; public interest; proactive and adaptive). The findings contribute to public space governance and public administration literature by demonstrating that navigating everyday conflicts requires not only procedural knowledge but relational and attitudinal capacities largely absent from current competence frameworks, proposing a set of ten core competences as an empirical basis for future research and training.