Abstract
Both climate change and water safety are textbook examples of wicked problems. Due to the
ambiguous knowledge bases and contested values characterising these problems, frame
differences among stakeholders and participants often result in severe political debate and not
seldom evolve into controversies at and between different levels of governance, domains and
scientific disciplines. An interesting exception appears to be the Dutch Second Delta Committee. In
2008 the committee presented twelve recommendations to the Dutch government on how to
secure the Netherlands for severe flooding due to climate change. Despite the wicked nature of
both climate change and water safety and the expensiveness of the recommended measures the
committee succeeded surprisingly well in getting the new water management frame on the policy
agenda without serious opposition or debate. In this paper we try to show how the dominant frame
concerning water-safety issues in the Netherlands was influenced by the emerging climate change
frame in the international media, policy and politics. By focussing on three different critical
discourse moments we indicate how the existing Dutch water safety frame absorbed the climate
change frame evolving into a new perspective on water safety which was successfully employed by
the Second Delta Committee in tackling a classical wicked problem. Subsequently we show that
with the recent fall of the climate change issue, this specific water safety frame evolved into a
perspective disregarding climate change but remaining a wider timeframe indicating more political
room to manoeuvre in times of budget cuts and increasing climate scepticism.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages | 1-18 |
Publication status | Published - 2011 |
Event | 6th International Conference in Interpretive Policy Analysis: Discursive Spaces. Politics, Practices and Power, Cardiff, United Kingdom - Duration: 23 Jun 2011 → 25 Jun 2011 |
Conference
Conference | 6th International Conference in Interpretive Policy Analysis: Discursive Spaces. Politics, Practices and Power, Cardiff, United Kingdom |
---|---|
Period | 23/06/11 → 25/06/11 |
Keywords
- climatic change
- flood control
- water policy
- stakeholders
- governance