Jannes Willems

Anticipating water infrastructure renewal : A framing perspective on organizational learning in public agencies

Water authorities in Western countries are increasingly confronted with waterway renewal. Ageing waterway infrastructures put the reliability of the existing network under pressure. Similarly, they open up the need to anticipate long-term uncertainties to ensure network performance. Aligning organizational practices to this new context can be considered an organizational learning process, which concerns improving current practices as well as reconsidering underlying values. Against the background of public management reforms, we aim to understand the organizational learning process in a case study of the Dutch authority Rijkswaterstaat, which is facing a major waterway renewal challenge. By developing a framing perspective on organizational learning, our analysis theoretically provides more insight into agencies anticipating change and empirically into waterway renewal in practice. Our research demonstrates that waterway renewal is primarily framed from a New Public Management viewpoint in which change is approached rather pragmatically. Accordingly, we observed a refinement of existing practice that protects the agency’s mission. Higher levels of learning were discarded as potentially disruptive to waterway management, leaving more fundamental change untouched. We therefore question to what extent water authorities are capable of fully addressing waterway renewal. Nevertheless, the repositioning process resulted in opportunities for reflecting on dominant frames and introducing new concepts. To better seize such opportunities and thus improve alignment to waterway renewal, water authorities can, in addition to improving existing practices, re-interpret dominant frames and construct a new narrative in which future, long-term uncertainties are acknowledged as inherent conditions for agencies to cope with.

Potentials of Entrepreneurial Thinking for Planning: Debates during the 11th AESOP Young Academics Conference

Abstract Between 10 and 13 April 2017, the 11th AESOP Young Academics Conference took place at the Technical University of Munich on the theme of “Planning and Entrepreneurship – Planning and Public Policy at the Intersection of Top-down and Bottom-up Action”. The conference’s aim was to seek to understand (i) how planners can shape conditions so that young enterprises and innovative local activism can thrive and (ii) how planners themselves can benefit by integrating entrepreneurial thinking into their routines. The bandwidth of papers resembled the breadth of planning as a discipline gathered under the AESOP umbrella. Several bridges connecting planning and entrepreneurship became apparent, among them that (i) planning can provide an ecosystem for entrepreneurial activities that support local economies, providing a liveable environment for communities, (ii) planning approaches should succeed in incorporating the demands from market-based entrepreneurialism while creating a different and inclusive form of planning, and (iii) planners should support, and become, “hackers” and social entrepreneurs.