Abstract
This chapter reviews preceding cases of citizen engagement in water governance in the country, focusing on the interaction and relationship between citizen initiatives and governmental agencies in two cases from the Room for the River program, in order to provide a reference for Asian cases depicted in the following chapters. In the Netherlands, the traditional sectoral engineering approach has been used for water management for many years. However, the transition from this traditional method to an interactive method for integrated water management co-produced by citizens and government has been accelerated. Through comparative studies of two cases of flood risk management projects, this chapter shows contextual differences in the strategy, resources, and goals of initiators and governmental responses to stakeholder initiatives. The findings and discussions in this chapter contribute to the development of the theory of water governance and provide a perspective to analyze Asian cases where the role of government is still dominant in water governance.
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Notes
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Both houses of Parliament discuss proposed legislation and review of the actions of the cabinet. The Second Chamber also has the right to propose or amend legislation.
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This process means that the social, ideological, and religious pillars on which the Dutch society was built started to crumble. This process was accompanied with a process of democratization and emancipation of citizens. Citizens more and more resisted to hierarchical decision-making by political elites (Lijphart, 1969) and claimed more say in decision-making and personal freedom.
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In France, like in the USA, drives to reduce river degradation due to large dams brought together aquatic ecology, hydrology, and geomorphology. In the Netherlands and Germany, pollution was a more prominent concern, and in the former country, a “hydraulic culture” of damming and diking still dominates thinking (Van Hemert 2008: 108–109) – a heritage that continues to influence interpretations of adaptation in terms of resistance instead of resilience (Warner et al. 2012).
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Measures in the plan include placing and moving dikes; depoldering, creating, and increasing the depth of flood channels; reducing the height of the groins; removing obstacles; and constructing a “Green River” which would serve as a flood bypass. This will result in lower flood levels. By 2015 the Rhine branches will safely cope with an outlet capacity of 16,000 cubic meters of water per second; the measures implemented to achieve this will also improve the quality of the environment of the river basin.
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The lessons learned from the Room for the River program also have international relevance, as the concepts of making space for rivers and new multilevel and interactive governance approaches are also being adopted by other countries (Rijke et al. 2012). For example, the concept of making space for rivers is being applied in countries, such as France, Germany, Hungary, Romania, the UK, and the USA (Warner et al. 2012).
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Edelenbos, J. (2019). Citizen Initiatives in Water Governance in the Netherlands: Reflection and Implication to Asian Cases. In: Otsuka, K. (eds) Interactive Approaches to Water Governance in Asia. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2399-7_2
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