guarantee a successful or effective policy implementation. In the course of the policy process a consultative approach increasingly gave way to a predominantly repressive approach and the use of authoritative instruments such as police enforcement. 3
In the end, traditional political habits of relentless negotiating and bargaining between political parties determine the outcome of the legislative process.
4
The mundane and less visible process of policy implementation is at least as important for the situation of sex workers than the earlier and more visible stages of policy formulation and design.
5
The same moral and political pressures that shape policy design also shape policy implementation. Perhaps even more so as much implementation takes place away from the public eye.
6
Policy implementation has focused on “easy” targets (street workers) and has been more circumspect with “difficult” targets (licensing for sex facilities). What made the latter target more difficult is among other things the legally prescribed one-year period in which proprietors could adapt to the proposed licensing. For street workers such a period of grace did not exist. It is probably too early to draw firm conclusions from the Viennese case about the success of the new licensing system for clubs, given the interim period of one year which will end on November 1, 2012.
7
So far, one-sided implementation measures have made the work conditions of street workers worse and have done nothing to improve those in the club sector, although, as we argued above, the licensing system is still under development, similar to the Netherlands, and might require a number of years to be fully developed.
In the next section we will discuss local policymaking in the three participating Dutch cities and see to what extent the above conclusions apply there too. 67
5.3 Local policy making in the Netherlands 5.3.1 The social and policy environment in the Netherlands after the legalization of sex facilities When the Dutch parliament in October 2000 adopted a law that made it legal to own and manage sex facilities, it aimed for three broad goals: 1) to separate voluntary from involuntary prostitution, 2) to “protect the position” of sex workers (Outshoorn, 2004: 198, 199), and 3) to fight trafficking and other crime associated with prosti tution, and 4) to prevent prostitution of under-aged. Prostitution needed to be decriminalized by making the business of prostitution the subject of administrative law, which regulates the operation of sex establishments, and labour law, which regulates the worker rights and workplace conditions of prostitutes. Criminal law, the original province of the regulation of prostitution, was to be restricted to the criminal activities that accompa nied (some) prostitution. Barring criminal activity, the state has no business in the transactions that occur be tween women (or men) and their clients. The assumption was that by normalizing sex work and bringing it into the i nstitutional core of the Dutch administrative and welfare regulatory framework, it would be easier to crack down on the illegal and criminal aspects of the prostitution sector. The key policy instrument in the implemen tation of the law was a licensing and monitoring system for sex facilities. The Dutch approach was thus designed as a mixture of regulating and decriminalizing impulses. The implementation of the law, as is common in the decentralized unitary state that is the Netherlands (Andeweg & Irwin, 2002), was devolved to municipalities. When the law went into effect it had two immediate consequences. First, the new Act stipulated that only legal residents from EU countries or those having proper documents were allowed to work in licensed facilities. Pro prietors ran the risk that they would incur fines or that their facility would be closed if they employed sex workers without proper documents. That meant that almost overnight a large number of sex workers from non-EU coun -
International Comparative Study of Prostitution Policy: Austria and the Netherlands