Governing Justice: Analysing Urban Heat Adaptation and Climate Equity in The Hague

This thesis examines how urban heat adaptation governance in The Hague (2020–2025) shapes climate-justice outcomes by analysing how institutional structures, participation practices, and equity mechanisms condition implementation. The central research question is: How has governance of urban heat adaptation in The Hague between 2020 and 2025 shaped climate-justice outcomes across distributional, procedural, and recognitional dimensions? Using a qualitative case-study design, the research combines ten semi-structured interviews with municipal staff and civil-society actors; analysis of twelve core adaptation and participation documents; targeted spatial analysis of distance to designated cool spaces and green cover; and thematic coding in ATLAS.TI. Evidence is triangulated to judge where arrangements and instruments advance or hinder justice, with attention to decision rights, budgeting, and siting choices. The empirical focus is the municipal scale, with neighbourhood variation foregrounded in analysis and interpretation. Findings indicate that heat is acknowledged in strategy, yet implementation remains fragmented and weakly tied to equity. Distributionally, funding instruments that hinge on resident initiative and co-financing advantage higher-capacity neighbourhoods; high-exposure areas are structurally under-prioritised for greening and cooling. Procedurally, participation typically occurs late with limited mandate and diffuse accountability, producing consultation rather than shared decision-making. Recognitionally, references to “vulnerable groups” lack an operational framework able to address intersecting needs, including language barriers, migration background, and trust. Mechanistically, portfolio logics and the allocation of decision rights concentrate accountability in strategic units while assigning operational responsibility to development services, without mandatory equity screens at programme and siting decisions. In practice, feasibility and asset-lifecycle timing outweigh exposure and capacity need, constraining justice-oriented prioritisation. The study concludes that adaptation without embedded justice mechanisms risks reproducing inequality. Three shifts are recommended: integrate vulnerability criteria into budgeting and spatial prioritisation, with minimum service standards for cooling access; institutionalise inclusive, neighbourhood-scale participation with clear decision rights, minimum accessibility requirements, and feedback obligations; and adopt justice-oriented evaluation tools with disaggregated indicators and public reporting. Overall, the thesis argues for a transition from technical adaptation to transformative governance, in which justice is designed in at the start and iteratively evaluated across planning, siting, delivery, and learning.