Normalization Revisited: A Critical Multi-Actor Study of Local Prostitution Governance in the Netherlands

The Dutch governance of prostitution has long been associated with regulation, tolerance, and normalization, culminating in 2000 with the lifting of the brothel ban—popularly seen as legalization. Yet since the early 2000s, scholars have noted a shift toward stricter control and surveillance. While national legislation sought to balance normalization with crime prevention, municipalities—tasked with implementation—have reframed prostitution as primarily a problem of trafficking and exploitation. This has driven regulation, monitoring, and punitive measures. This dissertation examines the evolving governance of prostitution in the Netherlands through a Foucauldian governmentality lens, focusing on the interplay of normalizing and abnormalizing discourses in The Hague. The Hague provides a compelling case: it combines multiple prostitution forms and has a policy history oriented toward normalization.

Empirically, the study draws on 39 interviews with municipal officials, police, welfare workers, business owners, clients, and some sex workers, alongside policy documents and online ethnography of 1,311 client forum posts. Methodologically, it extends textual governmentality approaches by integrating practice-oriented data, highlighting how discourses are enacted and produced by diverse actors.

Municipality, welfare, and police

Local policy interweaves normalization with abnormalizing concerns about trafficking and exploitation. Initiatives such as exit programs or regulation of home-based prostitution appear to be abnormalizing but, in practice, are absorbed into normalizing frameworks. Welfare organizations and police embed them within routines of care and professionalism, reinforcing the aim of constructing a safer, more governable market. Central here is the municipality’s quest for complete visibility: making prostitution legible to the state is seen as essential for both regulation and normalization. This visibility imperative excludes clients, who remain largely outside surveillance.

Entrepreneurs of prostitution businesses

Licensed business owners are responsibilized as regulatory intermediaries. Licensing grants legitimacy but imposes heavy monitoring duties: entrepreneurs must ensure safe conditions, prevent exploitation, and oversee both workers and clients. This dual positioning—partners yet risks—shifts regulation from state to private actors. Owners internalize surveillance, fostering self-regulation and professionalization, but also monopolistic tendencies, particularly in window prostitution. Increased managerial oversight further reduces sex workers’ autonomy.

Clients, rarely studied in policy, are shown to navigate multiple discourses—sexuality, intimacy, market logic, and stigma—to define themselves as ordinary citizens with legitimate needs, responsible consumers wary of exploitation, and participants in a stigmatized market. Online forums serve as sites of collective self-governance, establishing norms regarding safety, responsibility, and market conduct. Though invisible in policy, clients actively contribute to governance by reinforcing normalization through market mechanisms.

The analysis demonstrates that The Hague’s governance has not shifted from normalization to abnormalization but has intensified normalization itself. Crime and trafficking discourses are not external threats but integrated into regulation, legitimizing surveillance and responsibilization while underpinning the market logic of Dutch policy. Municipalities, entrepreneurs, welfare workers, and clients all engage in practices that sustain the construction of a well-functioning prostitution market.

The dissertation contributes to public administration by applying Foucauldian insights to governance, showing power as dispersed and productive rather than solely repressive. It advances governmentality studies by emphasizing the agency of actors who adapt, translate, and sometimes resist rationalities—e.g., welfare workers shaping exit programs, entrepreneurs negotiating licensing, and clients creating self-governing identities. Methodologically, it broadens governmentality research by grounding discourse analysis in governmental practices. Conclusion: Dutch prostitution governance is best understood not as a binary shift but as a recursive process: normalization absorbs abnormalization, expanding its reach. Governance is simultaneously enabling and restrictive, productive and repressive, reflecting the complexities of regulating morally contested domains. This calls for nuanced, empirically grounded analyses of public policy that account for both rationalities and practices in shaping how issues are “thought into existence.”