In many countries around the world impacts of climate change are assessed and adaptation options identified. We describe an approach for a qualitative and quantitative assessment of adaptation options to respond to climate change in the Netherlands. The study introduces an inventory and ranking of adaptation options based on stakeholder analysis and expert judgement, and presents some estimates of incremental costs and benefits. The qualitative assessment focuses on ranking and prioritisation of adaptation options. Options are selected and identified and discussed by stakeholders on the basis of a sectoral approach, and assessed with respect to their importance, urgency and other characteristics by experts. The preliminary quantitative assessment identifies incremental costs and benefits of adaptation options. Priority ranking based on a weighted sum of criteria reveals that in the Netherlands integrated nature and water management and risk based policies rank high, followed by policies aiming at ‘climate proof’ housing and infrastructure.

More than half the world's population lives in cities, and over two-thirds of the world's cities will be exposed to flooding within the next 30 years due to factors including climate change, land subsidence, sea level rise, and socio-economic development. Traditionally, flood management has concentrated on providing protection against floods using technical measures, but there is currently an international shift towards more integrated flood risk management, whereby flood risk is defined as the probability of flooding multiplied by the potential consequences. Governance plays a key role in this transition. However, relatively little has been written on how climate governance lessons are implemented on a city-scale. Several characteristics of recent climate change adaptation governance, relating to its structure, orientation, content, and timeframe, are gleaned from the research literature. Flood risk management of two cities – Jakarta and Rotterdam – is examined.

Different ways of knowing (WOKs) present in governance processes easily give rise to controversies and conflicts and forestall collective action. To resolve these conflicts it is necessary to understand what constitutes a WOK and how we can organize inclusion through collaborative governance. This paper argues that WOKs contain different knowledge elements: they contain different bodies of factual knowledge, formulate specific knowledge questions, and prefer different methods and knowledge institutes. WOKs also encompass different frames, interpretations, or normative perceptions of reality. And finally, different WOKs make use of different sources and types of organizing capacity. Realizing successful collaborative governance processes means organizing inclusion of these different components of knowledge. This paper investigates the implications of this knowledge diversity for realizing collaborative governance processes and the challenges for inclusive knowledge management—through an in-depth case study of a collaborative governance process between the Netherlands and Flanders. We conclude that realizing inclusion between various WOKs and their knowledge components contributes to the overall success of a collaborative governance process. However, managing inclusive knowledge is as much a matter of conscious strategies as it is the result of an emergent interaction process between stakeholders, experts, and officials within various WOKs. Furthermore, although knowledge inclusion facilitates successful negotiation between stakeholders, it doesn't guarantee a successful outcome of these negotiations.

Innovations in public policy are difficult to realize if decision-making arrangements are not scrutinized at the same time. Rigid institutional arrangements often hinder the realization of policy breakthroughs. Consequently, in the day-to-day practice of public administration, more and more experiments with innovative arrangements towards realizing groundbreaking policy decisions are being seen. Two rather different examples of such arrangements in the Dutch context are transition arenas and pilot projects (proeftuinen). In this article we describe these arrangements from an innovation management perspective and evaluate their functioning by focusing on their approaches to two dilemmas: the dilemma between diversity and closedness within the innovation plans and the dilemma between openness and closedness of the plan in relation to its context, the outside world. From their comparison we can learn about the context-specific application of different innovation plans and the results of different ways of handling these innovation dilemmas.