The city of Amsterdam is well-known for its creative citizens, innovative use of public spaces, and bottom up and informal (citizen) initiatives. Many of these initiatives are endorsed and - after some time - formalised by local government. However, some need to be relocated or disappear due to densification-strategies. This is particularly the case in contexts of urban growth and not unique for Amsterdam. Depending on the specific circumstances, densification strategies compensate densification with nature conservation and/or public space programs. Densification is a contested approach – chiefly because it often entails quantitative approaches that are abstracting specific places into numerical value and generalized policy ambitions that do not resonate with the creative language and practical wisdom and imagination at play in the specific places. Often, these strategies also involve uncertainty regarding their relationship with informal citizen initiatives. Particularly in the urban fringe, we see a variety of initiatives that have developed over the years and which have obtained temporary approval for their activities. In this pop-up research we explore if, and how techniques of research by design contribute to making productive these confrontations – between formal and informal resources, between practical wisdom and generalised knowledge, between local creative-artistic and more general quantitative approaches - with the broader aim to create more sustainable and liveable cities.

Cities have the potential to substantially contribute to climate change mitigation. Seeking to realise this potential city governments are increasingly collaborating directly with firms and citizens in urban governance. This approach to governance has become known as joined-up governance. It is progressively recognised as a promising means of addressing complex urban challenges, including the necessary transition to low-carbon cities. Joined-up governance has, however, been more theorized than empirically studied. Little is known about whether, to what extent, or in what ways joined-up governance ‘works’. This project addresses this knowledge gap by evaluating and refining theorising on joined-up urban governance.

Researchers from four Dutch universities (WUR, UU, VU, UM) have recently initiated the ‘Nederlands Kenniscentrum Voedselbeleid’, an interdisciplinary centre for the production and dissemination of knowledge on food policy. This event aims to formally kick off this centre, together with potentially interested peers and societal stakeholders, and to set up a research project and consortium for the NWA.

Governments across the globe face considerable challenges to govern climate change adaptation. Integrating climate change adaptation into existing policy domains such as health, agriculture and water is crucial to ensure adequate, timely and coherent responses to manage the unavoidable risks of climate change. However, it is increasingly argued that these integration efforts are progressing far too slow, are not transformative enough, or are moving in the wrong direction. Previous studies on environmental and climate policy integration as well as public policy studies suggest that the likelihood, pace and nature of policy integration is strongly influenced and constrained by the institutional characteristics of governments, such as their constitutions, political systems or administrative routines. Other studies argue that policy integration is more determined by politics such as turf wars than institutional characteristics. So far, these studies struggle with combining the temporal and contextual dimensions; are either top-down or bottom-up orientated; are overly simplified due to large-n ambitions or impossible to generalise because they are single-n studies; or understand integration as outcome rather than process. This has hampered scientific and policy progress on policy integration. This VENI project aims to address these questions by elaborating a processual framework of policy integration. The study uses macro-level quantitative methods to analyse how institutional characteristics shape the depth, scope and pace of adaptation policy integration within a large sample of countries. This step is complemented with micro-level qualitative analysis using a mechanismic approach to understand and theorize the politics of adaptation policy integration in four selected countries. The results of this study will critically inform our theoretical understanding of policy integration in general and for adaptation in particular, inform policy debates on the integration of adaptation in existing policy domains across different countries, and develop country specific intervention strategies to accelerate, deepen and upscale policy integration.

In the face of global challenges such as climate change, innovation in water services is urgently needed. Institutional innovation is happening on a large scale, in which hybrid institutions emerge, which share risks between private, public and community actors. Advancing institutional theory of risk, the range of choices these risk-pooling actors make are exposed. The global set-up of this project, the attention for the urgent transition to a more sustainable society and the focus on joint learning will make sure the project results in new insights in the design of the water utilities of the future.