Kristiaan R.D. Lulofs

Building with Nature: in search of resilient storm surge protection strategies

Low-lying, densely populated coastal areas worldwide are under threat, requiring coastal managers to develop new strategies to cope with land subsidence, sea-level rise and the increasing risk of storm-surge-induced floods. Traditional engineering approaches optimizing for safety are often suboptimal with respect to other functions and are neither resilient nor sustainable. Densely populated deltas in particular need more resilient solutions that are robust, sustainable, adaptable, multifunctional and yet economically feasible. Innovative concepts such as ‘Building with Nature’ provide a basis for coastal protection strategies that are able to follow gradual changes in climate and other environmental conditions, while maintaining flood safety, ecological values and socio-economic functions. This paper presents a conceptual framework for Building with Nature that is used to evaluate coastal protection strategies, based on a case study of the Holland coast in the Netherlands. The added value and the limitations of these strategies are discussed.

The Impact of Multi-Level Governance on Energy Performance in the Current Dutch Housing Stock

The housing sector is responsible for 33% of total CO2 emissions in the Netherlands. As such, large reductions in CO2 emissions can be gained by increasing the energy performance in the existing housing stock. Yet, several barriers make this difficult. Renovation investments and maintenance costs are high while badly needed norms for energy improvement are absent. Furthermore, market developments and sectoral policies reflect a complex institutional environment in which many actors are interdependent, but also lack an individual sense of urgency regarding energy consumption. In this article, we try to determine how multi-level governance in Dutch housing affects the outcomes of policies aimed at CO2-reduction in the existing housing stock. We examined two housing sectors in the Netherlands: social housing and owner occupancy. We focus on policy implementation problems in the early 2000s. It turns out that the complex multilevel environment severely impedes the realization of ambitious policy goals.

Framing mechanisms: the interpretive policy entrepreneur’s toolbox

ABSTRACT Policy entrepreneurs were, originally, neither conceived to be active meaning-makers nor did they interact with other actors. They invested other resources such as time, energy, reputation and money in coupling problems, solutions and politics. Adding the interpretive dimension of interactional framing mechanisms turns them into interpretive policy entrepreneurs. This perspective improves our understanding of policy cases in which initial frame conflicts are resolved by extensive meaning-making work by one specific actor. We illustrate this interpretive policy entrepreneur concept with the innovative Sand Motor mega-sand nourishment scheme case, an artificial peninsula of 21 million m3 at the South Holland coast. Designed to achieve multiple aims, this coastal management scheme should serve coastal protection, nature development as well as recreational purposes. In the risk-averse, complex policy domain of Dutch coastal management, the provincial government of South Holland turned out to be an adept meaning-maker by linking other actors’ problem definitions to their proposed solution. Fourteen in-depth, semi-structured interviews put the provincial government at the heart of several framing interactions that led to frame convergence and ultimately the resolution of the initial frame conflict. Our interpretive analysis of framing interactions concludes that interactional framing mechanisms can reveal interpretive policy entrepreneurs.