What makes long-term investment decisions forward looking: A framework applied to the case of Amsterdam's new sea lock

Earlier this year, Wieke Pot published the first paper of her PhD on forward-looking decisions on water infrastructure. Decisions on water infrastructure are long term decisions and often involve significant policy investments. But are these decisions necessarily forward-looking? In this paper, the concept of forward-looking decisions is proposed: decisions that anticipate and account for uncertain futures. The value of the framework is demonstrated in an analysis of decisions about a new sea lock at IJmuiden in the Netherlands.

What makes long-term investment decisions forward looking: A framework applied to the case of Amsterdam's new sea lock

Abstract: Long-term investments challenge decision makers to look into the far future. Existing future studies often build upon a rational idea of decision making that does not help to explain why decision makers anticipate the future. In addition, existing studies do not provide a clear definition of what is considered as “forward looking”. This article proposes a framework that can be used to evaluate and explain for what reasons and based on what criteria decision makers take forward-looking investment decisions. We apply this framework to a specific decision-making case about a Dutch sea lock, making use of interviews (n = 16) and a content analysis of primary documents (n = 430). We find that not all investment decisions are necessarily forward looking. Secondly, we conclude from our case that decisions became forward looking because administrators used scenarios, visions, and flexible solutions to build support, avoid political risks and comply to formal rules. Scenario developers and urban planners could therefore involve administrators in early stages of the decision-making process to increase their awareness of the future towards which they are steering and provide them with alternative future paths. Furthermore, they could identify and use relevant institutional rules with forward-looking features to stimulate forward-looking decisions.

The article is available (open access) at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2018.01.031

Pot, W. D., Dewulf, A., Biesbroek, G. R., Vlist, M. J. van der, & Termeer, C. J. A. M. (2018). What makes long-term investment decisions forward looking: A framework applied to the case of Amsterdam’s new sea lock. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 132(January), 174–190.

Does information on the interdependence of climate adaptation measures stimulate collaboration?

As a final result of the ECOMPRIS project, a paper has been published in Regional Environmental change. It is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between Merel van der Wal, Paul Opdam, Ingrid Coninx, Eveline Steingröver, Sven Stremke and myself, led by Claire Vos.

Does information on the interdependence of climate adaptation measures stimulate collaboration? A case study analysis

A key issue in implementing adaptation strategies at the landscape level is that landowners take measures on their land collectively. We explored the role of information in collective decision-making in a landscape planning process in the Baakse Beek region, the Netherlands. Information was provided on (a) the degree to which measures contribute to multiple purposes, (b) whether they are beneficial to stakeholders representing different sectors of land use, and (c) the need for landscape-level implementation of adaptation measures. Our analysis suggests that the negotiation process resulted in collective decisions for more collaborative adaptation measures than could be expected from individual preferences previous to the planning session. Based on the results, it is plausible that the provided information enhanced integrative agreements by leading stakeholders to realize that they were mutually interdependent, both in acquiring individual benefits as well as in implementing the measures at the landscape level. Our findings are significant in the context of the emerging insight that targeted information provision for climate adaptation of landscapes can support collaboration between the relevant stakeholders.

The paper is published Open Access and is freely available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-018-1306-x

Climate change communication in the Netherlands

Together with Daan Boezeman and Martijn Vink, I was asked to reconstruct the history of climate change communication in the Netherlands for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Going back to the 1950s and covering two "climate change waves", we used the theoretical perspectives of framing and agenda setting, science-policy-society interactions, and online communication in the network society, to guide our analysis. National and international policy developments are both the objects and drivers of communication processes over time.

The paper can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.455

Here's the abstract and the full reference:

Climate change communication in the Netherlands started in the 1950s, but it was not until the late 1970s that the issue earned a place on the public agenda, as an aspect of the energy problem, and in the shadow of controversy about nuclear energy. Driven largely by scientific reports and political initiatives, the first climate change wave can be observed in the period from 1987 to 1989, as part of a broader environmental consciousness wave. The Netherlands took an active role in international climate change initiatives at the time but struggled to achieve domestic emission reductions throughout the 1990s. The political turmoil in the early 2000s dominated Dutch public debate, until An Inconvenient Truth triggered the second climate change wave in 2006–2007, generating peak media attention and broad societal activity. The combination of COP15 and Climategate in late 2009 marked a turning point in Dutch climate change communication, with online communication and climate-sceptic voices gaining much more prominence. Climate change mitigation was pushed down on the societal and political agenda in the 2010s. Climate change adaptation had received much attention during the second climate change wave and had been firmly institutionalized with respect to flood defense and other water management issues. By 2015 a landmark climate change court case and the Paris Agreement at COP21 were fueling climate change communication once again.

Dewulf, A., Boezeman, D., & Vink, M. (2017). Climate Change Communication in the Netherlands. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science (pp. 1–35). Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.455

Results from the Mountain-EVO project: two publications on the social and hydrological aspects of water

Two publications resulting from the Mountain-EVO project have become available. They both address the social and hydrological aspects of water governance.

The paper by Feng Mao and others addresses the implications of how social and hydrological systems are conceptualized when studying their resilience. The paper by Julian Clark and others develops a theoretical framework on hydrosocialities and applies it to two remote mountain communities in the Mustang region in Nepal.

Mao, F., Clark, J., Karpouzoglou, T., Dewulf, A., Buytaert, W., & Hannah, D. (2017). HESS Opinions: A conceptual framework for assessing socio-hydrological resilience under change. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 21(7), 3655–3670. https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-3655-2017

Clark, J., Gurung, P., Chapagain, P. S., Regmi, S., Bhusal, J. K., Karpouzoglou, T., … Dewulf, A. (2017). Water as Time-Substance: The Hydrosocialities of Climate Change in Nepal. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 4452(July), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1329005

User-driven design of decision support systems for polycentric environmental resources management

Another result from the Mountain-EVO project has been published in Environmental Modelling and Software. The paper was led by Zed Zulkafli, former postdoc at Imperial College and now Lecturer at Universiti Putra Malaysia. The paper presents and a participatory framework for designing decision-support systems that builds on understanding the decision making processes and on iterative design of the user interface. The framework is illustrated with a Peruvian case study.

User-driven design of decision support systems for polycentric environmental resources management

Open and decentralized technologies such as the Internet provide increasing opportunities to create knowledge and deliver computer-based decision support for multiple types of users across scales. However, environmental decision support systems/tools (henceforth EDSS) are often strongly science-driven and assuming single types of decision makers, and hence poorly suited for more decentralized and polycentric decision making contexts. In such contexts, EDSS need to be tailored to meet diverse user requirements to ensure that it provides useful (relevant), usable (intuitive), and exchangeable (institutionally unobstructed) information for decision support for different types of actors. To address these issues, we present a participatory framework for designing EDSS that emphasizes a more complete understanding of the decision making structures and iterative design of the user interface. We illustrate the application of the framework through a case study within the context of water-stressed upstream/downstream communities in Lima, Peru.

Zulkafli, Z., Perez, K., Vitolo, C., Buytaert, W., Karpouzoglou, T., Dewulf, A., … Shaheed, S. (2017). User-driven design of decision support systems for polycentric environmental resources management. Environmental Modelling & Software, 88, 58–73. 

The is open access and can be downloaded from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2016.10.012