Delivering Change

This book addresses pressing challenges of policy makers, planners and project managers in the water sector to successfully implement adaptation action. Taking into account both strategic planning and implementation of adaptation projects, it provides principles and attributes that contribute to the effective delivery of adaptation to flooding and drought.
The book is organised around questions of 'what?', 'when?', 'why?' and 'how?'. It explains that a governance approach to adaptation is effective when it is 'fit-for-purpose' in a specific social-ecological or socio-technical context. The concept of 'fit-for-purpose' governance is applied to evaluate the effectiveness of governance efforts in three Australian cities to adapt to a decade of drought.
Based on a case study of the Room for the River flood protection programme in the Netherlands, this book describes how planned adaptation projects in multi-stakeholder settings can be managed effectively and how large scale investment programmes can contribute to a transition of a water system that is adapting to a changed context.
The cases in Australia and the Netherlands are used to link governance for strategic planning and governance for the delivery of adaptation. Through combining insights about multi-level governance, adaptive governance, transition management, programme management this book enriches the scientific literature about adaptation to flooding and drought.

Jeroen Rijke is a consultant at Triple Bridge and a researcher at UNESCO-IHE. His work focuses on assisting policy makers, planners and project managers with developing adaptive strategies and management approaches for sustainable infrastructure, mainly in the water sector. Jeroen is a civil engineer (TU Delft) who is trained in policy sciences (KTH, Monash University) and has worked across Europe, Australia and Africa.

His PhD focused on the governance of adaptation to flooding and drought (TU Delft and UNESCO-IHE). He has analysed governance responses to a decade of drought in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide to provide building blocks for enhancing innovative urban stormwater management practices and establishing transitions towards 'water sensitive cities'. In addition, he evaluated multi-level governance processes within the 2.2 billion Room for the River programme in the Netherlands to develop recommendations for Rijkswaterstaat and the Delta Programme to improve existing programme management practices and establish adaptive delta management.　

Prior to his PhD research, Jeroen mainly focused on climate adaptation in urban areas. He was lead author of a State of the Art report about climate adaptation in urban areas that played an instrumental role in the programming of the research on this topic of the Dutch national Knowledge for Climate research programme. Also, he was involved in a national assessment of the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of Dutch cities to climate change that was conducted for the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL).