A. van den Brink

The origins of Dutch rural planning: a study of the early history of land consolidation in the Netherlands

This article explores the institutional and organizational foundations of rural planning in the Netherlands. The key objective of the study was to understand the background to and determining factors in the development of land consolidation (ruilverkaveling) as an instrument of rural planning. Dutch rural planning, as a constituent part of spatial planning in the Netherlands, developed quite separately from urban planning. This article traces the roots of this separate development back to the period 1890–1940. At the end of the nineteenth century, reformist liberals argued for a legislative framework for the rational reallocation of land parcels to consolidate fragmented land holdings. The early initiatives came to nothing because of the prevailing rigid distinction between public and private interests. The First World War changed this situation. The decline in world trade forced the government to make the national economy more self‐sufficient. Land consolidation was embraced as a means for supporting the agricultural sector by improving land drainage and bringing land into cultivation. From the beginning of the 1930s agricultural politics and rural planning grew closer together, and took off rapidly in the post‐war decades.

Controlled Decontrolling: Involution and Democratisation in Dutch Rural Planning

The debate between proponents of collaborative planning theory and their critics on the dynamics of power in planning highlights a discrepancy between the norms and the practices of democratic planning. According to the norm of democratic planning, all participants should have an equal opportunity to influence and to realise a plans objectives, but practice has shown that power is unequally divided between people, privileging some and excluding others. This raises the important issue of how normative aspirations of deliberative planning can be reconciled with actual planning practices. This article discusses this question, exploring the power relationships and institutional transformations that influence planning using two case studies about conflicts over Dutch rural land use.The debate between proponents of collaborative planning theory and their critics on the dynamics of power in planning highlights a discrepancy between the norms and the practices of democratic planning. According to the norm of democratic planning, all participants should have an equal opportunity to influence and to realise a plans objectives, but practice has shown that power is unequally divided between people, privileging some and excluding others. This raises the important issue of how normative aspirations of deliberative planning can be reconciled with actual planning practices. This article discusses this question, exploring the power relationships and institutional transformations that influence planning using two case studies about conflicts over Dutch rural land use.

Some like it hot: the effect of temperature on brood development in the invasive crab Hemigrapsus takanoi (Decapoda: Brachyura: Varunidae).

The duration of brood development in the introduced crab, Hemigrapsus takanoi in the Oosterschelde, The Netherlands, was compared at three different water temperatures. At 12, 18 and 24°C the females took an average of 32, 11 and 8 days respectively to lay eggs, which took 86, 28 and 18 days respectively to complete development. Five stages of development were identified, with each brood stage comprising a similar proportion of the duration time at different temperatures. The duration of each brood stage was also somewhat proportional to the number of females found carrying each brood stage in the field at the beginning of the breeding season. There appears to be a trigger for the breeding season in H. takanoi in the field at around 15°C above which ovary development begins. The results suggest that an increase in water temperature as a result of climate change may result in an increased net reproductive rate in H. takanoi due to earlier onset of the breeding season and increased number of broods per inter-moult period resulting in population growth. Increased temperatures may therefore lead to increased invasiveness of H. takanoi where it is already present, and range extension into locations where its establishment is currently excluded by unsuitable temperature

Handling uncertainty through adaptiveness in planning approaches: comparing adaptive delta management and the water diplomacy framework

ABSTRACT Planners and water managers seek to be adaptive to handle uncertainty through the use of planning approaches. In this paper, we study what type of adaptiveness is proposed and how this may be operationalized in planning approaches to adequately handle different uncertainties. We took a comparative case study approach to study two planning approaches: the water diplomacy framework (WDF) and adaptive delta management (ADM). We found that the approaches differ in their conceptualization of uncertainty and show that different types of adaptiveness are used in the approaches. While WDF builds on collaborative adaptive management as a set of ongoing adjustments and continuous learning to handle uncertainty, ADM deliberately attempts to anticipate future adaptations through a set of tools which allows for seizing opportunities and avoiding lock-in and lock-out mechanisms. We conclude that neither of the approaches is fully able to account for different uncertainties. Both approaches may benefit from specific insights in what uncertainty and adaptiveness entail for the development of water management plans.

The effect of temperature on brood duration in three Halicarcinus species (Crustacea: Brachyura: Hymenosomatidae)

The effect of temperature on brood development was investigated for three intertidal hymenosomatid crabs: Halicarcinus cookii, H. varius and H. innominatus in Kaikoura, New Zealand. The duration of brood incubation decreased as temperature increased, as did the interbrood period. The duration of each stage of brood development also decreased with increased temperature, but the proportion of total incubation time for each stage remained relatively similar at different temperatures. Hymenosomatid crabs have determinate growth, but moult to maturity at different sizes, thereafter devoting most of their energy to reproduction. The number of broods a female could carry in her lifetime was estimated for each species. Halicarcinus cookii was estimated to be able to produce eight complete broods of 1146 eggs per lifetime, H. varius was estimated to be able to produce seven complete broods of 1051 eggs per lifetime and H. innominatus was estimated to be able to produce six complete broods of 1081 eggs per life time. With the predicted global temperature rise of 2°C in the next 50 years, the authors estimate that, for all three species, a female could produce one extra brood per lifetime (a 10–15% increase in fecundity depending on species), even more if crabs reach maturity faster, potentially leading to a significant population increase