3.1.1 Introduction Module 3 ‘Governing the River’

Course subject(s) Module 3. Governing the River

Pristine rivers govern themselves. A soon as human actions that aim to increase the water safety level or the contribution of rivers to socio-economic development start to influence each other, the need to coordinate these actions arises. Consequently, institutions emerge or are developed to support the required coordination.

Along rivers, the need for coordination is evident from the physical interaction between water uses. In the Dutch Room for the River program coordination between stakeholders was rooted in shared values on flood safety and the spatial value of the riverine landscape. Based on these values, a policy process was devised that made it possible to coordinate actions and balance interest at the program and project level and between public and private stakeholders.

The contribution of the innovative design of the decentralized and actor-centered Room for the River governance structure to the project’s success can hardly be underestimated.

In the following video professor Ellen Minkman introduces herself and the subject of this module.

Learning objectives module 3

To understand how stakeholders play a role in river basin management processes and even sometimes changed designs (iteratively, in a process)
To summarize the decision making process for Room for the River programme in the Netherlands
To understand the added complexity of planning long time horizons, e.g. if we take next generations into account as stakeholders
To understand what would happen if we would take the river itself as a stakeholder (or even give it legal rights)

Room for Rivers: Perspectives on River Basin Management by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://online-learning.tudelft.nl/courses/room-for-rivers-perspectives-on-river-basin-management/.