Rijkswaterstaat: Guardian of the Dutch Delta

Founded in 1798, Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch government’s agency for infrastructural works, brought flood security, navigable waterways and highways to the Netherlands. It is an iconic institution within Dutch society, best known for its ‘battle against the water’. The Zuiderzee Works (1920–1968) and the Delta Works (1954–1997) brought worldwide acclaim. This chapter tells the story of a humble semi-military organization that developed into a formidable institution of civil engineers with a strong technocratic mission mystique. It also recounts the institutional crisis the agency experienced in the 1970s–1990s when it was too slow to adapt to major sociocultural and political changes. To ride the waves of change, it eventually developed several proactive adaptation strategies and reinvented its mission mystique in managerial terms. Adaptation to climate change now presents another key challenge, for which Rijkswaterstaat will have to develop a new ‘social license to operate’.

The Dutch Delta Approach

The Netherlands is an extreme example of a country highly susceptible to both sea-level rise and river flooding. After the disastrous flooding of 1953, the Dutch established a legal framework for flood protection and realized a series of impressive delta works. A powerful institutional regime of autonomous regional water boards, a well-developed expert community, and the Rijkswaterstaat (the executive agency of the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment) maintained this framework making the Netherlands one of the best protected delta areas of the world, and an international hallmark for delta management. More recently, the Dutch reformulated their ‘delta approach’ in order to adapt to the possible but uncertain impacts of climate change. This chapter unravels the factors that could explain the long-standing policy success and the reinvention of this policy. Reinventing successful policies is not self-evident, because path dependency often prevents learning and change, and core competencies easily become core rigidities. In hindsight, the Dutch Delta Programme—an external vehicle to come to a revision of the Dutch delta approach—can be seen as a device to successfully combine exploitation (sustaining the successful elements of the former flood management regime) and exploration (developing new strategies and avenues to deal with new challenges related to climate change).

Dutch Delta Resiliency by Societal Learning Introducing the Intertwined Process of Daily Practice and Theory Development

The Wester coastal Delta zone of the Netherlands is the relatively more crowded area of the country where ten of the seventeen million people live. The governmental prognosis is that this number of people will increase steadily in the coming decennia, unless the threat of climate-change seawater level rising. This is the picture in more Delta zones globally what makes the topic of resiliency for these delta-areas of importance. Approaches of resiliency are often dominated by governmental rescue planning and believe in technology solutions, while in the process the behaviour of people can make the difference in overcoming climate-change impact disasters. In the struggle against high water storming and flooding, the Dutch people prove this by developing societal resilient behaviour in a broad spectrum of activities. Post-PhD research on Dutch resilient behaviour in the in 1016-flooded Zaanstreek-Waterland area near the city of Amsterdam confirms that. Recently research by questionnaire among citizens in this region shows that people have favour for shared responsibility with government and related professional organizations. The Dutch examples of societal resiliency carried by people also show a action-learning perspective intertwined with governmental contingency planning. Therewith the Dutch practice shows a positive cross-fertilization of practice and knowledge development.