Citizen Participation in Climate Adaptation in the Netherlands: Governing Beyond Public Space

This master thesis, citizen participation in climate adaptation is studied on a personal, small-scale level: the actions of citizens on their own private residential property. Specifically, the implementation of local adaptation policy by citizens on private residential property, with any form of local government support, has been examined. The concept “citizen self-management”, derived from the health sector, was chosen to describe this phenomenon. Citizen self-management is a form of production in which the citizen as an individual can manage and decide on the means to locally adopt the higher-level plans of the government (Bracht and Tsouros, 1990). The aim of this study was to compare and explain the role of Dutch local governments in stimulating citizen self-management in climate adaptive rainwater measures on citizens’ private residential property. The research objective was to improve the effectiveness of climate adaptive water projects initiated by local governments, both frontrunners and newly developing ones. First a literature study was conducted, followed by an empirical, qualitative research. Due to COVID-19 limitations, participants were interviewed online. Seven cases were studied, which were diverse in size of the municipal organisation itself, the size of the team working in climate adaptive policy and how far along the local government is in developing and implementing their policy. The participation framework by Mees et al. (2019) was used to analyse the variety of material-incentives used by local governments to stimulate self-management. Most of the examined cases are still pioneers in the local adaptation policies. Both policy creation and implementation are done experimentally through a variety of different projects and pilot-based solutions. Further research is therefore required. This study has resulted in five practical policy recommendations, which are going to be shared with both the participants of this research as well as any other interested Dutch policy officials. They consist of new insights of the researcher through conducting this research as well as some of the best practices of the examined cases. In short, the recommendations are to 1. Learn from others 2. Lower the threshold to participate 3. Make use of external partners 4. Set a good example 5. Rethink design.