Abstract

Safety used to be a pretty straightforward concept: governments need to safeguard the country from invasion and its citizens from crime. Over time, additional issues became to be defined as a safety problem. Even so, the safety problems and their accompanying policies remained clearly demarcated – safety revolved, for example, around product safety. Recently, an encompassing safety concept has become popular in the Netherlands. No longer referring to a clearly demarcated policy issue, the concept and its related integrated safety policy covers everything from fighting crime to making sure that street lights work. In this article, we show how safety in general has become firmly embedded on the Dutch government agenda over time and explain what integrated safety policy entails.