P. Jong

Between tradition and innovation: developing Flood Risk Management Plans in the Netherlands

Traditionally, governmental authorities in the Netherlands have a strong focus on the construction and maintenance of flood defences, such as dikes and dams. The last decades, however, there has been a growing awareness of the importance of spatial planning for flood risk management. With the arrival of the Floods Directive (2007), it is likely that even more attention will be paid to sustainable spatial planning to reduce flood risks. From an institutional perspective, this paper explores the way in which the Netherlands is now attempting to further integrate water management and spatial planning in the preparation of its first Flood Risk Management Plans. The current internal policy debate centres around five important issues concerning the required measures, instruments, rules, governance styles and time perspectives. Maintaining its strong, engineering-based water management tradition, and at the same time institutionalising a framework for a more holistic flood risk management that comprises not only rules and regulations for probability reduction but also for impact reduction through sustainable spatial planning turns out to be a challenging task. The recently established national Delta Commissioner (2012) could be an important stimulus for the further integration and innovation of water management and spatial planning.

The adaptive capacity of institutions in the spatial planning, water, agriculture and nature sectors in the Netherlands

The climate change problem calls for a continuously responding society. This raises the question: Do our institutions allow and encourage society to continuously adapt to climate change? This paper uses the Adaptive Capacity Wheel (ACW) to assess the adaptive capacity of formal and informal institutions in four sectors in the Netherlands: spatial planning, water, agriculture and nature. Formal institutions are examined through an assessment of 11 key policy documents and informal institutions are analysed through four case studies covering each sector. Based on these ACW analyses, both sector-specific and more general strengths and weaknesses of the adaptive capacity of institutions in the Netherlands are identified. The paper concludes that the most important challenge for increasing institutional adaptive capacity lies in combining decentralized, participatory approaches with more top-down methods that generate leadership (visions, goals) standards, instruments, resources and monitoring.

Adaptation Strategies in the Netherlands

Although climate change has been prominently featured on the global scientific and political agendas since the World Climate Conference in 1979 (WCC 1979), the specific importance of adaptation to climate change has only been underlined about 20 years later. The Netherlands, because it lies largely under sea level, has much to benefit from climate change adaptation. Surprisingly, however, although the Netherlands has been very active in pursuing international climate change politics, the country has not put much effort in politicizing climate change adaptation internationally in this early period and domestically published its National Adaptation Strategy only as late as 2007. This chapter attempts to explain the evolution of Dutch climate change adaptation strategies. It examines adaptation policies in four climate-related sectors (water, nature, agriculture and spatial planning) to identify general patterns regarding adaptation strategies in the Netherlands.