Maarten Hajer is professor of Public Policy at the University of Amsterdam since 1998. The Dutch Cabinet appointed him as Director of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL – Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving) in 2008. He continues his professorship part time.
As director of the Environmental Assessment Agency, Hajer is responsible for the strategic assessments and policy evaluations to facilitate political deliberation and decision making, ranging from environment, nature, and land use to water and transport. While primarily focused on the Dutch political decision making, PBL is also active for international bodies, such as the European Commission, OECD and UNEP. Hajer is also member of the UNEP Resource Panel concerned with strategic issues of resource scarcity, decoupling and resource-efficiency.
Hajer is the author of more than ten books and many articles and contributions to books. In 2009 he published Authoritative Governance: Policy Making in the Age of Mediatization (Oxford University Press). In 2010 Strong Stories – how the Dutch reinvent their Planning Practice (010-Publishers, Rotterdam, editor together with Jantine Grijzen en Susan van‘t Klooster) and in 2011 he wrote ‘The Energetic Society – towards a Philosophy of Governance for a Clean Economy’cf. www.pbl.nl