Towards a Joint Maintenance Approach for floodplain management in the Netherlands: tensions and possibilities

While multi-functional river rehabilitation has taken the limelight in today's water management, its follow-up phase, maintenance, has done so to a far lesser extent. A key challenge for today´s environmental management is the number and diversity of actors and sectors involved, each with their own perceptions, interests and resources. This chapter seeks to apply the gains made in the Joint Planning Approach (JPA), developed earlier at Radboud University, the Netherlands, to the maintenance stage of river planning. The application of that approach in the densely populated Netherlands is contrasted with an example of top-down, mono-functional maintenance in a floodplain area in the southwest. It is found that the approach brings considerable opportunities to integrate a fragmented field but that considerable challenges remain related to fragmented policies, building collaborative entities, and organizational constraints.