I am an assistant professor in climate resilient transitions in civil engineering and management at the University of Twente. Climate change necessitates substantial changes to our living environment. Climate change induced heat stress and pluvial flooding require a range of blue and green infrastructure measures in urban areas. Sea-level rise may render existing dikes obsolete and warrant flood risk management measures next to conventional water protection measures. The production of renewable energy implies numerous energy installations and substantial underground infrastructure renewal. In the meantime, post-war built viaducts require revision and maintenance in roughly the same timeframe, resulting in significant peaks in work and resource use in the next several decades. These societal challenges all have fundamental implications for how our living environment is designed, planned, constructed, managed and demolished to make it climate-resilient.
As physical space is limited above and below ground in densely populated countries such as the Netherlands (or urban areas more in general), the opportunity arises to develop solutions that contribute to tackling multiple societal challenges. Such an integrative approach offers a promising perspective to address interconnected societal challenges in a coordinated, coherent way. The status quo, however, are siloed approaches potentially leading to missed out opportunities, inefficiencies, and additional construction work. In my research, I explore what mechanisms help to implement an integrative approach. Trained as a public administration scholar and now working in the Civil Engineering and Management department at the University of Twente, I explicitly strive to bridge the gap between policy making and project level implementation. An analytical lens that I often use in this context is that of institutions. Institutions provide certainty to actor interactions and therefore are a key leverage point to facilitate transformative change.