Does Collaboration Lead to More Integrative Solutions for Flood Risk Management? Insights from a Large Scale Infrastructure Project in the Netherlands

The safety standards for flood protection in the Netherlands have been updated recently. It is expected that most major flood protection infrastructure will have to be reinforced to meet the new standards. The Dutch government aims at accomplishing this task through innovative integrated projects in which investments in flood safety are coordinated with spatial agendas, nature development or other sectoral objectives. The planning and implementation of such integrated projects is challenging given the sectoral silos and differences in sectoral interests, objectives, and decision making procedures. Establishing collaboration within this polycentric structure requires effective forms of governance arrangements and institutional frameworks. This is particularly important given contradictory claims about the expected benefits and costs of collaboration as a management tool for complex issues. The central question of this paper is to what extent does collaboration lead to integrative flood risk management solutions that are expected to create multiple public values? To answer this research question we have employed a case study strategy. One of the large integrative projects within the Dutch Flood Protection Programme is the project Grebbedijk along the river Nederrijn. In this project various alternatives for realizing the new flood risk standards have been explored by concerned agencies. Over the course of four years exploration period, public and private organisations representing different policy sectors work jointly to explore opportunities to linking dike safety objective with spatial and ecological solutions on and around the dike. The comprehensiveness of exploration phases implies that chosen integrative and collaborative approach is likely to make a difference. Once agreed and approved, the preferred alternative sets a path for planning and implementation phases of these projects. However, it is precisely the mechanisms that are triggered by collaborative processes and dynamics and that link them with the preferred alternative in a productive relationship that remains disputed. The integrative framework for collaborative governance is used as an analytical tool to study the project Grebbedijk as a collaborative governance regime with the involved formal/informal agents as regime participants. The process performance of Grebbedijk is studied by analysing the principled engagement (behavioural interaction between the regime participants), shared motivation (interpersonal and relational components of interaction process) and capacity for joint action (cross-functional elements of establishing institutional arrangements and consolidating knowledge and resources). Supported by an extensive document analysis, observations made during project meetings as well as a series of in depth interviews, we have conducted process tracing to assess the project’s collaboration-intensive four years phase to shed light on the causal questions of why and how things happened. The main conclusion of the analysis is that collaboration improves the quality of solutions for flood risk management in terms of accommodating multiple public values. However, attention to the full suite of collaboration dynamics appears necessary for process design and efficiency, as lack of trust as well as changing leadership can limit the end-results of otherwise strong collaborative processes.