Jacko van Ast

Visioning with the Public: Incorporating Public Values in Landscape Planning

This article focuses on the incorporation of values in visioning, an early stage of landscape planning from a social learning perspective. After an introduction of social learning in planning and visioning directed at expert knowledge and public values, two visioning cases are evaluated. The authors assess methods of making public values manifest and ways to include them in the visioning process. The cases show that surveys, semi-structured interviews and the emphasis on values during the visioning exercise itself were suitable methods to acquaint civilians with both their own values and those of others. The explicit values made communication more effective and enhanced social learning. In both cases, the civilians proved to be capable of expressing their values and visioning in conjunction with experts. The article concludes with the impact of integrating values in landscape planning, the learning process that emerged between the stakeholders and the implication of the findings for visioning practices elsewhere.

Implementation of GIS-Based Applications in Water Governance

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are computer programs that are able to bring large amounts of data of both the physical and the social system together in one comprehensive overview shown digitally. GIS occurred very rapidly on the Dutch policy agenda. In this paper we analyze how the fast introduction process of GIS-based instruments in water management and more specifically in river flood management can be explained. By applying a range of classical models on agenda-setting, we show the important contribution of GIS to the water and flood issue in current spatial planning and policy development in the Netherlands.

Embedding economic drivers in participative water management

Country location influences the institutional surroundings of the infrastructures related to water systems. In the Netherlands, water management has its own particularities. Temporarily inflow of affluent water from the rivers or the sea resulted in a highly developed institutional setting based on flood risk prevention. From an economic perspective, managing water is about allocating and using water in an effective and efficient way. This article deals with the coordination problem related to multi functionality of water systems. ‘Allocation efficiency’ is the issue. The diversity of water systems such as rivers, lakes, ditches or groundwater is multifunctional and within the systems, demand is competing. Decision makers should be aware of the different aspects of infrastructures that interfere with water systems. Further on in the decision-making, these aspects need to be valued. This may be done explicitly (for example in a formal cost-benefit analysis) or implicitly. Implicit valuation takes place when the outcome of a choice is expressed without an explicit weight and value of the effects a project has. The focus of this article is on economic drivers that express values to decision makers and thereby may stimulate the implementation of planned water projects. The problem addressed here is how these economic drivers may be institutionalized and what institutional (re-)designs are necessary to organize the coordination problem related to the multi functionality of water systems. It is part of participative water management that, under the name of Joint Planning Approach (JPA), is developed during the ‘Freude am Fluss’ international project that aims at formulating and realizing adaptation strategies in water management, specifically the realization of more space for rivers.