Mark Wiering

The regional governance of climate adaptation: A framework for developing legitimate, effective, and resilient governance arrangements

Adaptation to climate change raises important governance issues. Notwithstanding the increasing attention on climate adaptation at the global and European level, the variety of local conditions and climate impacts points towards a prime role for regional actors in climate change adaptation. They face the challenge of developing and implementing adaptation options and increasing the adaptive capacity of regions so that expected or unexpected impacts of future climate change can be addressed. This paper presents a conceptual framework to analyse the regional governance of climate adaptation. It addresses the following key questions: (1) What are the distinct challenges for the regional governance of climate adaptation? (2) Which concepts can guide the design of new governance arrangements and strategies? (3) What challenges to legal principles are posed by the climate? (4) What research methods are suitable for developing and testing governance arrangements and strategies? We present a framework designed to address each of these questions; it has analytical, design, normative, and methodological components. In the paper, examples from the Dutch regional governance of climate adaptation serve as illustrations of the conceptual argumentation.

When water management meets spatial planning: a policy-arrangements perspective

In water management and in spatial planning there is a debate on the fundamental underlying discourses of the policy domains. In Dutch water management an emergent discourse of ‘accommodating water’, which is competing with the traditional ‘battle against water’ discourse, can be seen. In Dutch spatial planning there is a debate on new practices of area-specific development planning, which are considered to reflect new ideas on spatiality better than the traditional Dutch planning doctrine. The authors discuss these recent developments, and attempt to analyse institutional changes with the help of the perspective of policy arrangements. The analysis is focused on the interrelations between the two policy arrangements, and both new ‘rules of the game’ and new policy practices are considered. The question is posed as to whether these practices are forerunners of new arrangements or do they merely reflect a revised policy and planning agenda of the existing institutional order?

The institutional space of community initiatives for renewable energy: a comparative case study of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark

BackgroundCommunity initiatives for renewable energy are emerging across Europe but with varying numbers, success rates and strategies. A literature overview identifies structural, strategic and biophysical conditions for community success. Our analysis focuses on institutional structure, as we describe the variety between the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, and place this within the institutional context of the policies, power structures and energy discourses of each country.MethodsWe conducted a policy arrangements analysis with a series of semi-structured interviews, extensive content analysis of policy documents, media analysis and use of existing research, in a qualitative comparative analysis between the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.ResultsWe demonstrate that the (evolving) institutional configuration of the energy sector strongly influences the available space for community initiative development. Denmark has a traditionally civil society-friendly energy sector, although opportunities for communities have decreased following the scaling up of production facilities. The Netherlands knows a predominantly market-oriented institutional arrangement that leaves little space for communities, but the potential for community based energy is increasingly recognized. In Germany, the typically state-dominant Energiewende strategy creates a window of opportunity for community initiatives that fit within the state policy.ConclusionsWe conclude that the institutional arrangement of the energy policy subsystem can both constrain or enable community energy projects. Decentralization appears to be one of the most important characteristics of the general institutional development and generally increases the institutional space for local (community) players. The alignment of discourses across government levels and actors is one of the important enabling features of an energy system, as it provides the stability and predictability of the system that enables communities to engage in renewable energy projects.

Assessing Stability and Dynamics in Flood Risk Governance

European urban agglomerations face increasing flood risks due to urbanization and the effects of climate change. These risks are addressed at European, national and regional policy levels. A diversification and alignment of Flood Risk Management Strategies (FRMSs) can make vulnerable urban agglomerations more resilient to flooding, but this may require new Flood Risk Governance Arrangements (FRGAs) or changes in existing ones. While much technical knowledge on Flood Risk Management is available, scientific insights into the actual and/or necessary FRGAs so far are rather limited and fragmented. This article addresses this knowledge gap by presenting a research approach for assessing FRGAs. This approach allows for the integration of insights from policy scientists and legal scholars into one coherent framework that can be used to identify Flood Risk Management Strategies and analyse Flood Risk Governance Arrangements. In addition, approaches for explaining and evaluating (shifts in) FRGAs are introduced. The research approach is illustrated by referring to the rise of the Dutch risk-based approach called ‘multi-layered safety’ and more specifically its application in the city of Dordrecht. The article is concluded with an overview of potential next steps, including comparative analyses of FRGAs in different regions. Insights in these FRGAS are crucial to enable the identification of action perspectives for flood risk governance for actors at the level of the EU, its member states, regional authorities, and public-private partnerships.

Stakeholder value orientations in water management

Current water management issues are characterized by factual uncertainty, relating to limits of scientific knowledge, and value uncertainty, relating to the policy process of making subjective choices. Developing and informing approaches for integrated water management (IWM) requires bringing facts and values together. This study examines the way value orientations differentiate themselves among IWM stakeholders and assesses implications for the scientific support and policy context of integrated approaches. Using Q-methodology, we identify five orientations that represent characteristically different ways of valuing water systems and their management by stakeholders in terms of cognitive, ethical, and affective value priorities. The findings indicate that scientific support to substantiate IWM needs to be extended to include social sciences and that preferences regarding the outcome of policy strategies may differ between stakeholders due to divergent orientations. Decision makers can benefit from the understanding of different value orientations to resolve conflicts, develop planning scenarios, and build consensus.

The marathon of the hare and the tortoise: implementing the EU Water Framework Directive

Reading the available evidence on the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD), one gets the impression that some countries anticipate implementation problems by starting off pragmatically and with relatively low ambitions, while others make a quick and ambitious start and tend to slow down in later phases of the process. Inspired by Lundqvists classical study of air pollution policy in the USA and Sweden, we assess the importance of some general characteristics of the respective political-institutional systems to explain differences in WFD implementation in four EU countries: Denmark, France, England/Wales and the Netherlands. We conclude, among other things, that visibility of the policy process, accountability of politicians and policy makers vis-à-vis their stakeholders and the EU, division of responsibilities for policy formulation vs. implementation and the involvement of the public explain the level of ambition in EU implementation to a considerable extent. Thus, the Lundqvist variables turn out to be useful for both classifying and explaining differences in EU implementation processes.

The Concept of Resilience from a Normative Perspective: Examples from Dutch Adaptation Strategies

Both in academic literature and political practice, resilience is becoming a central evaluative concept for assessing climate adaptation policies. This makes sense because society’s main challenge in an altering the environment is to adapt to the inevitable changes. However, applying the concept of resilience to devise adaptation strategies reveals that social-ecological resilience acquires different meanings depending on the social context. There is no straightforward application of resilience. In this contribution, it will be argued that giving meaning to the concept of resilience in adaptation strategies requires making normative choices. These choices concern whether there is a public interest in adaptation, the distribution of private and public responsibilities, and striking a balance between individual rights and general interests. Because these normative choices can be questioned and revised, it is important that they are made explicit to enable a democratic debate on the direction that adaptation strategies should take. Simply referring to the concept of resilience in an adaptation strategy does not suffice, but occludes this discussion. Through formulating and applying a condensed scheme of politico-theoretical approaches that underpin diverging adaptation approaches, this contribution reveals the various underlying normative assumptions and explicates the relevant political choices. Three Dutch adaptation strategies serve as empirical examples. They illustrate the importance of the societal context in giving meaning to resilience in the development of adaptation strategies.

The Institutional Dynamics of Water Management in the Low Countries

‘Institutionalisation’ refers to ongoing processes of both renewal and stabilisation of policy practices. From this angle, water management is particularly interesting, because of its history – it is one of the oldest community-based tasks in the Low Countries – and because of its dynamics in recent times. Water institutions are both deeply rooted in historical traditions and contested in the last few years. In this chapter we want to describe and interpret the institutional dynamics, by means of comparing the water policy arrangements in the Netherlands and Flanders. The central empirical question in this chapter is: what impact does ‘integrated water management’ (IWM), as a new element in the discourse on water policy, have on the organizational dimensions of water policy arrangements? In both countries IWM was introduced, but the impact and the usage of the concept differ. Further, this empirical question is linked to theories of institutional change: what circumstances explain a different reception of IWM in both countries? Why do some of the dimensions of the policy arrangement show stability in time while others are more dynamic? And, are the institutional changes to be considered shallow or deep? The water policy arrangements are analysed on the level of the sector based, national policy arrangements, whereby Flemish policy replaces the Belgium level of governmental interference because of the country’s federal structure. We could have chosen underlying aggregation levels, e.g. only water quality issues or only flooding management, and reach far more detail. For purposes of international comparison however, and to relate our findings to ‘systemic’ institutional changes, it is better to focus on the national level. After explaining our theoretical framework in the first section, the second section will ‘set the scene’ with a description of the characteristics of Flemish and Dutch water policy arrangements in the early 1990s.

Shock events and flood risk management: a media analysis of the institutional long-term effects of flood events in the Netherlands and Poland

Flood events that have proven to create shock waves in society, which we will call shock events, can open windows of opportunity that allow different actor groups to introduce new ideas. Shock events, however, can also strengthen the status quo. We will take flood events as our object of study. Whereas others focus mainly on the immediate impact and disaster management, we will focus on the long-term impact on and resilience of flood risk governance arrangements. Over the last 25 years, both the Netherlands and Poland have suffered several flood-related events. These triggered strategic and institutional changes, but to different degrees. In a comparative analysis these endogenous processes, i.e., the importance of framing of the flood event, its exploitation by different actor groups, and the extent to which arrangements are actually changing, are examined. In line with previous research, our analysis revealed that shock events test the capacity to resist and bounce back and provide opportunities for adapting and learning. They “open up” institutional arrangements and make them more susceptible to change, increasing the opportunity for adaptation. In this way they can facilitate a shift toward different degrees of resilience, i.e., by adjusting the current strategic approach or by moving toward another strategic approach. The direction of change is influenced by the actors and the frames they introduce, and their ability to increase the resonance of the frame. The persistence of change seems to be influenced by the evolution of the initial management approach, the availability of resources, or the willingness to allocate resources.

Solidarity in water management

Adaptation to climate change can be an inclusive and collective, rather than an individual effort. The choice for collective arrangements is tied to a call for solidarity. We distinguish between one-sided (assisting community members in need) and two-sided solidarity (furthering a common interest) and between voluntary and compulsory solidarity. We assess the strength of solidarity as a basis for adaptation measures in six Dutch water management case studies. Traditionally, Dutch water management is characterized by compulsory two-sided solidarity at the water board level. Since the French times, the state is involved through compulsory national solidarity contributions to avoid societal disruption by major floods. In so far as this furthers a common interest, the contributions qualify as two-sided solidarity, but if it is considered assistance to flood-prone areas, they also qualify as one-sided solidarity. Although the Delta Programme explicitly continues on this path, our case studies show that solidarity continues to play an important role in Dutch water management in the process of adapting to a changing climate, but that an undifferentiated call for solidarity will likely result in debates over who should pay what and why. Such discussions can lead to cancellation or postponement of adaptation measures, which are not considered to be in the common interest or result in an increased reliance on local solidarity.