1. Introduction
1.1 Civil engineering, old and new
In the corridors of the Department of Hydraulic Engineering of Delft University of Technology, a series of standing banners proudly presents three of the four professors in civil engineering who I study in this article as examples of public experts.Footnote 1 Flanked by a model of a ship dredger, these banners decorate the otherwise sober waiting area. Photos and catch phrases convey the areas of expertise of the department's professors. Han Vrijling's banner represents what is most commonly regarded as the tradition of Dutch hydraulic engineering: photos of immense structures of steel and concrete intervening in the landscape and protecting the hinterland, under bellicose headings such as “Storm Surge Barriers” and “Flood Defense Structures.” Marcel Stive's and Huib de Vriend's banners depict nearly artistic coastal shorelines, the result of the natural interplay of sand, water, and currents (Stive), and aerials of meandering rivers and estuaries (de Vriend), accompanied by phrases like “Coastal Zone Management,” “Biogeomorphology,” and “Sand Engine” (Stive), or “Space for the River,” “Meandering,” and “Morphology” (de Vriend). Various contrasts can be drawn between these banners (“Water Barriers vs. Water Management”; “Defense Structures vs. Natural Morphology”) and these reflect different perspectives in the debate on “new vs. old engineering,”Footnote 2 a debate that takes us right to the heart and soul of the Dutch approaches to “living and working with water.”Footnote 3 The breadth of this debate can be illustrated with the position of the fourth engineering expert studied here, Pier Vellinga. Were Vellinga to present himself on a similar conference banner, it would probably say something like “Climate Proofing,” “Adaptation,” and “Damage Mitigation,” and show pictures of broad dikes that can overflow, yet remain intact. As these banners demonstrate, they hold rather different positions in the debate about how to connect civil engineering with environmental concerns. Beyond the debate between the engineers, this is a struggle over political credibility of competing expertise.
These four professors are not random figures in the broad scientific field of hydraulic engineering. Rather, they are elite engineers, advising government on water and engineering policy, and they each have had a long career behind them during which they attained leading positions in engineering science and policy. What further connects these four engineers are the dual challenges they were faced with: 1) ongoing shifts in expert configurations, affecting power relations between politics and engineering experts; and 2) the concern with alternative approaches to flood security, mostly stemming from environmental concerns.
This article concerns itself with how these hydraulic engineers have been interacting with these dual developments: how have these four engineers attained and retained these leading positions as advisors to government policy, being able to influence the dominant policy frames? And how have they, as part of that, handled the scientific and political challenges for credibility that adjoin the integrating environmental concerns with flood safety? In this article I will study these aspects with these individual engineering experts by focusing on their boundary work, and the role of their scientific and professional biographies and identities. This will provide a valuable understanding of how scientific experts manage the credibility and position of themselves and their disciplines in a changing socio-political context.
1.2 Ecology, politics, and innovations in Dutch engineering
The question of how to balance environmental values and concerns of the coastal zone, including the Rhine and Meuse delta, with the technological interventions required for safety, the navigation of ships, or the division of water has concerned both contemporary water managers and their predecessors for the last 200 years. Between about 1800 and 1850 the understanding that rivers could be “normalized” gained the upper hand (Van Heezik Reference Van Heezik2008). This not only changed the physical landscape, but also the relations between the main actors in this field: the water boards and the provinces, responsible for the maintenance of water works, and Rijkswaterstaat, founded in 1798, as the most authoritative body (Lintsen and Ten Horn-van Nispen Reference Lintsen, Nispen, Schot, Rip and Albert de la Bruheze1998). The research facility for water works, Delft Hydraulics, was opened in 1928 and greatly enhanced the Dutch innovative capacity in the construction and design of water works (Disco Reference Disco, Schot, Rip and de la Bruheze1998).
A landmark event in the Dutch history and tradition of engineering is the 1953 flood disaster, in which the southwestern region of the Netherlands was inundated by the sea, killing over 1800 inhabitants. Immediately after this dramatic event, innovative plans were designed and implemented to prevent such a disaster from ever happening again: immense dams would close off all but two estuaries in the delta. With the construction of the Delta Works, engineering firms not only executed the construction, but also were involved in their design (Berkers and Ten Horn-van Nispen Reference Berkers, Nispen, Schot, Rip and Albert de la Bruheze1998; Van der Ham Reference Van der Ham1999; Bijker Reference Bijker2002).
This gradually developed political power of engineering experts was challenged from the 1960s onwards, when the public, hydrobiologists, and environmental scientists started to express concerns about the declining quality of nature, for example the water quality in the rivers (Van Heezik Reference Van Heezik2008), the construction of infrastructure (Van der Ham Reference Van der Ham1999; Van der Vleuten Reference Van der Vleuten, Schot, Lintsen and Rip2010), and last but not least, the Delta Works, including the Oosterschelde dam (Van der Ham Reference Van der Ham1999; Disco Reference Disco2002; Bijker Reference Bijker2002).
No less than a crisis unfolded in modern civil engineering that forced Rijkswaterstaat to include the ecological dimension in its ranks (Disco Reference Disco2002; Bijker Reference Bijker2002). According to the original plans, a dam would close off the entire Oosterschelde Estuary, destroying the estuary's ecological dynamics and affecting the region's economic prosperity. Following the general elections the closed dam option was discarded (Disco Reference Disco2002), and the subsequent decision to reduce ecological damage by building a storm surge barrier with sliding doors created a professional space for ecologist and biologists at Rijkswaterstaat, a new “jurisdictional vacancy” (Abbott Reference Abbott1988; Disco Reference Disco2002). In Bijker's words, “the Oosterschelde barrier plunged the Netherlands and Dutch water management into deep crisis” (Bijker Reference Bijker2002, 582). Despite, and perhaps because of, the challenges the Oosterschelde created, this was only a partial victory for ecologists over civil engineers, because the core identity of Rijkswaterstaat, and even more so of the academic branch of civil engineers, remained unaffected by this “ecological turn” (Disco Reference Disco2002).
Later crises in water management, for example peak discharges in the Rhine and Meuse delta in 1993 and 1994–1995, were focusing events for ecologists to push their perspectives higher on the political agenda (Kingdon Reference Kingdon1995; Birkland Reference Birkland1997), albeit not as effective as they hoped for (Reuss Reference Reuss2002, 469). They claimed that river works reduced the capacity to cope with peak discharges (Havinga and Smits Reference Havinga, Smits, Smits, Nienhuis and Leuven2000). Based on already existing plans, such as plan Stork,Footnote 4 the answer was to create “Room for the Rivers.” This “new approach to river management” (Smits, Nienhuis, and Leuven Reference Smits, Nienhuis and Leuven2000) centered around the idea of enlarging the flood plains by relocating the dikes farther away from the river, giving space to the river and restoring the ecology of floodplains. The ecological turn continued to affect the field of engineering, creating both dilemmas for Rijkswaterstaat (Van den Brink Reference Van den Brink2009), as well as opportunities for scientific cooperation – or tolerance – across disciplinary boundaries (Van Hemert Reference Van Hemert2008; Van Hemert and Van der Meulen Reference Van Hemert and Meulen2010).
1.3 Identities, boundaries and the public credibility of expertise
These developments presented two concerns for contemporary engineers. To start with, the challenge for the engineering experts has been, and still is, to ensure that their specialist engineering knowledge and the underlying agenda of flood protection remains authoritative as the dominant policy frame, implying that that politics remains in need of their expertise.
The second issue was that on a political and scientific plane the engineers had to connect the rise of environmental perspectives with concerns related to flood protection. This called for new demarcations between engineering science and other expertises, which is part of the enterprise in upholding one's public and political credibility and authority (Gieryn Reference Gieryn1999; for a recent example from the food sciences, see Penders and Nelis Reference Penders2011).
Before turning to a discussion of how boundary work is at play in the case of engineering, the notion of expertise deserves further attention. In explaining what an expert is, one can either refer to the particular knowledge people have, or to the position they occupy in a social network. The first is referred to as a “realistic” approach to expertise, as it claims that expertise is something (insight or knowledge) that truly grants the holder of specific expertise an advanced epistemic or experiential position (Collins and Evans Reference Collins and Evans2007). The second approach to expertise is referred to as “relational,” and regards expertise as a social attribute (Wynne Reference Wynne1992, 282), something that, in line with the semiotic approach, takes shape through interactions (Blumer Reference Blumer1969). I regard realistic and relational approaches not as mutually exclusive but as complementary perspectives on expertise. Given the focus on the boundary of experts and their public credibility, in this article the focus will be on the relational aspects of expertise.
Part of the game of this relational approach to expertise then is to see how scientific experts have positioned themselves vis-à-vis politicians and societal actors as their clientele, and towards other expertises. As Nico Stehr describes it, “the constitution of experts requires the parallel constitution of a certain clientele or public. Clients and experts have certain minimal common features, be it only the conviction that specialized knowledge is functional under certain circumstances” (Stehr Reference Stehr1994, 164). In advising government and communicating to the public, scientific experts seek to maintain or enhance the public's perception of them as having epistemic authority, in particular in the areas where science has departed from its institutional comfort zone and entered the open cultural space of a society that is turning in direction away from classic engineering frames of mind.
Hence, in understanding how experts make their knowledge “functional,” I employ the concept of “boundary work,” understood as the activity by scientists of separating science from non-science in order to remain credible as scientific experts (Gieryn Reference Gieryn1983, Reference Gieryn, Markle and Pinch1995, Reference Gieryn1999).
In the open cultural space where boundary work is said to take place, contestations of one's credibility may not just come from politicians or publics. Competing expertises also challenge the authority of the scientific experts studied here, and the question in those situations becomes who comes to hold jurisdiction or authority over the particular aspect, or as Andrew Abbott described it, which profession gets jurisdiction “to classify a problem, to reason about it, and to take action on it: in more formal terms, to diagnose, to infer, and to treat” (Abbott Reference Abbott1988, 40). As we will see, the battle over who is credible as an expert, and who has jurisdiction over issues, is a pertinent issue for visible experts.
The open cultural space of science where boundary work is performed is not, Gieryn argues, settled beforehand, but “the contours of science are shaped instead by the local contingencies of the moment: the adversaries then and there, the stakes, the geographically challenged audience” (Gieryn Reference Gieryn1999, 5). What is striking is the emphasis Gieryn puts on the “then and there,” each new situation creating a new round for contesting credibility. However, the “then and there” of boundary work is not entirely an isolated event: in the course of biographies, relations between experts and their clientele develop, and scientists develop a particular skill or style in presenting themselves as credible that may be more or less constant, depending on whom you are talking about. Boundary work in this article thus is not solely perceived as the interactions between people “there and then,” but always against the backdrop of earlier experiences and evolving (professional) identities. I will therefore supplement the notion of boundary work with that of identity work: the function of identity in planning actions and in reflecting upon or learning from experiences.
The experts’ professional identities, which developed in interaction with these debates, acts as an important cognitive frame for their strategies for communication and interactions (Dewulf et al. Reference Dewulf, Gray, Putnam, Lewicki, Aarts, Bouwen and Van Woerkum2009). In addition, their reflections on previous actions and interactions with policy makers, competing experts, and so on shape the way they draw boundaries and the way they will want to position themselves as credible experts. Their identity thus shapes their boundary work in these debates, as well as these debates themselves. In these reflections of experts, this is not just a first-order reflection, intended to make one's future actions more effective, but also a second-order reflection, reflections focussed on the frame from which one acts (see Rip Reference Rip2006). The notion of identity work can be used to describe the strategic planning, their (inter)actions, and their reflections aimed at maintaining credible positions (Van Rijswoud Reference Van Rijswoud2012).
2. Methodology: A Biographical-Narrative Approach to Scientific Experts
The main sources for this study are narrative interviews with the respondents, and empirical material that relates to those narratives (media sources, scientific publications, and policy documents). The material was interpreted from the perspective of individual boundary work and identity work, and was integrated in the form of expert narratives of the four leading experts.
The inductive development of narratives involved four iterative stages. In the first stage, data were collected on the academic and public track records of the four engineers, and on the socio-historical context of water engineering in which they were situated. This was used to prepare biographical-narrative interviews, the second step. These interviews focused on their experiences and development as experts in the context of policymaking and public debate. They were given the opportunity to reply to the ad verbatim transcripts, and one of them used that opportunity to shield off confidential information. The third step was to organize the data chronologically, with a focus on the diachronic data (data on events, their relations, and the effects of events). This step included the collection of additional data, for example by conducting a second interview, or interviewing other informants. In the final stage, the expert careers were written down as coherent and empirically-grounded narratives, thereby “explicating an intrinsically meaningful form” (Polkinghorne Reference Polkinghorne and Miller2005). Rather than being the only true reconstruction of past experiences and events, the expert narratives are a construction that appears most coherent in view of the expert's identity work. The labels used to structure these narratives must likewise be seen as provisional headings.
Consequently, as to the methodological validity of the narratives that emerge in this manner, it is important to see that the production process of narratives takes place on various levels. The first level is the level of the actual events as experienced by the scientists involved, the so-called lived story (Rosenthal Reference Rosenthal and Miller2005; Wengraf Reference Wengraf, Chamberlayne, Bornat and Wengraf2000). Subsequently, the scientists themselves will reflect on these events retrospectively and from a certain distance, and this continuous process will change their interpretation of the events that have taken place. This level can be referred to as the told story. Finally, as a result of the interactions, post hoc reflections, and reframings that take place between interviewee and researcher, the written story as a third level of narrative emerges (Littig Reference Littig2008). Thus, the written story builds on the two previous levels, and care is taken to secure the internal validity through iterative data collecting, the use of various empirical sources, and interview sessions, as is also the case here.
The scientists for this study were selected on the basis of the following criteria: (1) The respondents were still active and leading in the field; (2) they had demonstrable experience as public and political experts; (3) they had gained such experience over a long period of time; and (4) collectively, they belonged to the same generation. By studying policy reports, relevant committees, advisory councils, media records, and consulting colleagues in the field, I came to select Pier Vellinga (1950), Marcel Stive (1951), Huib de Vriend (1947), and Han Vrijling (1947) as the engineers to be studied. Following an invitation by e-mail to participate, they all agreed.
Pier Vellinga started his career in civil engineering at Delft Hydraulics in the late 1970s, where he obtained his PhD. After a brief career in politics he returned to academia in 1991. He is currently professor at Wageningen University and Research Centre, specializing in climate science and flood safety. Marcel Stive started working at Delft Hydraulics in 1977 and in 1994 was appointed professor in coastal engineering. His expertise lies in modeling coastal erosion. Huib de Vriend also worked at Delft Hydraulics in the early years of his career, but in the area of river modeling. He has worked at Delft University of Technology for most of his career. After a number of years at both the University of Twente (1993–2002) and Delft (1995 onwards), in 2002 he became scientific director of Delft Hydraulics, and since 2008 he has held a similar position at its successor Deltares. Han Vrijling started his career with the construction of the Oosterschelde storm surge barrier, based at the then Ministry of Transport and Public Works, where he developed the approach of probabilistic designing. After the barrier had been completed in 1986, he combined working for Rijkswaterstaat with a professorship in probabilistic design at Delft University of Technology, where he has been a full professor since 1995. In addition, Stive, Vrijling and de Vriend were members of the Technical Advisory Committee on Waterworks (TAW), the main advisory body to politics.
3. Stages of Appropriation
The developments in engineering that we have already outlined will be used as a backdrop to analyze the biographies of the four engineers. Rather than presenting the biographies one after the other for the entire time span of this article (1980–2009), I will discuss a number of successive stages. These stages are defined by important turning points in science, politics or society that impacted the roles of these scientists.Footnote 5
1. 1980s-1993: Building careers as a new generation of engineers
2. 1993–2003: River floodings and the return to Room for Rivers
3. 2003–2007: From politics to policy: expert advice in peril
4. 2007-present: Planning without flooding: the era of the Delta report
The first stage describes the first years of the engineers’ careers, a new generation of scientists who were educated in a period when ecological concerns towards engineering were well on their way. The second period starts with the 1993–1995 river floodings, events that gave extra force to budding ecological concerns in river management and resulted in the Room for Rivers program. The third period was introduced by what can be dubbed a political crisis, arising out of a rather dramatic shift in the advisory structure, affecting the political position of engineers. This was reinforced by Hurricane Katrina, an actual crisis that reinforced concerns about Dutch flood safety. The appointment of and report by the second Delta Committee (the first handled the 1953 flooding), a committee that was to present a solid water policy for the coming 100 years, marks the fourth and last period.
An examination of these periods indicates that they would appear to suffer from a focus on the present, with almost all attention being given to the more recent events. Due to the nature of the main empirical data, narratives told by engineers, some degree of presentism cannot be avoided as they are inherent in people's narratives about their own lives. However, there is also a contextual explanation as to why recent years are discussed in greater detail by the respondents: the theme of balancing flood safety with ecology has become more pronounced in recent years. In combination with the changes in the advisory structure, this means that developments in water engineering have been more rapid and fundamental since 2003.
3.1 Building careers as a new generation of engineers
During this first period, which followed the ecological crisis about the Oosterschelde storm surge barrier, Pier Vellinga, Marcel Stive, Huib de Vriend, and Han Vrijling were completing their studies, making their first career moves, and developing their own fields of expertise. They embodied a new generation of civil engineers from Delft. For Pier Vellinga, it was a period of dramatic career changes; the other three moved upwards in the ranks of “classic engineering.”
Pier Vellinga: from engineer to ambassador
In the 1980s, Pier Vellinga was working towards a professorship in his area of expertise: modelling dune erosion and sand transportation (Vellinga Reference Vellinga1986). However, the continuing focus on modeling without taking into account the broader socio-scientific context seemed a dead end to him, and reading the 1987 Brundtland report drew him closer to the climate issue. As an engineer he started to address the issue of sea level rise and climate change, which did not go unnoticed (Vellinga interview Reference Vellinga2009). In 1988, Winsemius and Nijpels, Consecutive Ministers of the Environment (1982–1986; 1986–1989) for the VVD (Dutch Liberal Party), managed to get Vellinga to become what he calls a “CO2 diplomat”: directing Dutch climate policy on the international stage. This implied two career moves in one go: the transition from science to policy, more precisely to the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning, and the Environment (VROM); and the shift of focus from hydraulic engineering to climate change. Gradually, Vellinga moved closer and closer to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). In 1988, he became a delegate to the first IPCC session (November 1988). He was also a delegate to the second (June 1989) and third sessions (February 1990), and during the fourth session (August 1990), he became a member of the IPCC's central bureau that coordinated the panel. Thus, Vellinga's involvement in new topics during these years at VROM dramatically increased the content and scope (politically, internationally, and scientifically) of his expertise. However, this excursion into politics also entailed a number of challenges. The scientific problem-framing of climate change with which he had started was increasingly challenged by political and economic interests. These political, public, and scientific impediments for a successful climate change policy led Vellinga to believe that their policy proposals were too ambitious and made him susceptible to economic approaches to the climate problem. In 1991, he chose to become director of the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), a leading Dutch institute with expertise in the economics and modeling of climate change. Combined with his background in engineering and politics this gave him a unique position of divide and rule (Vellinga interview Reference Vellinga2009).
Marcel Stive: politics of coastal engineering
Vellinga's former colleague at Delft Hydraulics, Marcel Stive, had an easier start to his career. One of the first projects he worked on at Delft Hydraulics was the plan for an industrial artificial island off the Dutch coast, a subject he would reencounter later in his career. Towards the end of the 1980s, after completing his dissertation in 1988, Stive became part of a multidisciplinary project called Coastal Genesis, and this project would result in his first real performance as an expert in the political arena. When Delft Hydraulics had just reorganized and the Minister for Transport, Public Works, and Water Management visited the institute, Stive was asked to present “something innovative.” Accordingly, he and his colleagues produced a white paper that presented the novel idea of underwater sand nourishment as a means to compensate for continuous coastal erosion. Rijkswaterstaat employees objected to this new method, for it disturbed their routines of beach maintenance, but Stive persisted and successfully brought it to the Minister's attention. When the first white paper on coastal policy was produced,Footnote 6 researchers like Stive made important contributions.
These episodes demonstrate how Stive was in a position to bypass policy makers by presenting his ideas directly to the Minister in making authoritative policy recommendations. His influence, unlike Vellinga’s, did not come from switching positions, but from staying in one. Retrospectively, he also stressed the uncertainty and contingency of his own role; he presents himself as someone “whose ideas happened to be accepted” (Stive interview Reference Stive2009).
Huib de Vriend: from river modeling to coastal modeling, and back again
Huib de Vriend is the third in a row of the engineers who spent the 1980s at Delft Hydraulics. Following his PhD in river morphology (De Vriend Reference De Vriend1981) his research focus shifted towards coastal morphology, a field Stive also worked in, and consequently they often published together. This multidisciplinary research at Delft Hydraulics continued until 1993, the year in which the University of Twente received permission to start its own civil engineering faculty. Subsequently de Vriend accepted a professorship in coastal morphology and management there. Soon, however, a research assessment advised the Twente faculty to collaborate with Delft. When a professorship at Delft in his home discipline of river morphology became available, Delft and Twente both supported the nomination of de Vriend. Since 1995, he has worked in both Twente and Delft, bridging the gap between the two universities.
Han Vrijling: on becoming a fossil
In 1974, the same year when it proved politically impossible to build a closed dam in the Oosterschelde, Han Vrijling, the fourth figure studied in this article, graduated from Delft University of Technology and started his career at an engineering firm. The relation with the Oosterschelde barrier soon became an intimate one, for he was seconded to the construction of the storm surge barrier. He found the science behind the project to be thrilling and experimental, and until 1982 he worked on the design of the barrier. These experiences reveal a firm relation between Vrijling and the traditional identity of civil engineering, that of constructing major waterworks. The greatest difference he identifies between himself and the other three engineers discussed here is that he is the only one who was actually involved in the designing and building of the Delta Works. With irony in his voice, he calls himself a “fossil,” the “last of the Mohicans” of traditional engineering who has a sense for the restrictions imposed by the realities of actual building (Vrijling interview Reference Vrijling2010).
After this success with combining engineering with the preservation of ecological values, he continued on the same path. One such example he spoke about was the alternative design for the Jumana River in India (1987), where he combined classic engineering with ecology. In 1990 he organized a workshop under the wings of the International Association of Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research, again connecting both disciplines (Bogardi, Saeijs, and Vrijling Reference Bogardi, Saeijs and Vrijling1991). It would turn out that these interactions with ecology would be the most constructive ones in his career. The differences in modeling, the disciplinary boundaries, and the supposed image of engineers as ecologists’ enemies made the cooperation untenable, and this led to the ending of the cooperation between him and the ecologists (ibid.).
3.2 1993–2003: River floodings and the return to Room for Rivers
The 1993 and 1995 floods and the Room for Rivers program were key turning points in the relation between ecology and engineering. After a short period of classic dike reinforcement, the grip of ecologists on engineering and water management became firmer and may even have taken the upper hand, depending on who you ask (Reuss Reference Reuss2002). One of the first responses from politics to the 1993–1995 events was to perform maintenance work that was due before the floods: in 1993 dike reinforcements had already been authorized. Nevertheless, in the years following the flooding and these subsequent classic responses, the ecological approach started to manifest itself in river management, and the stage for water engineering changed accordingly (Smits, Nienhuis, and Leuven Reference Smits, Nienhuis and Leuven2000).
Pier Vellinga: flood safety as a climate issue
The floods did not pose an immediate concern for Pier Vellinga. Water safety was not his main topic of interest. The scarce references to threatened flood safety illustrate that there was a “watershed” between the period 1987–2003, and the preceding and following periods in terms of his involvement in flood safety. At the time of the river floods Vellinga was director at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM). He presented and defended the evidence of the IPCC, and belonged to a solid national and international network of energy, climate change, and global development organizations. In other words, he was at the forefront of the major political and scientific developments. Upon arriving at the IVM he dived into economic theories in order to understand the political and industrial resistance towards climate policy, believing climate policy's economic underpinnings were in need of improvement. He realized however that it was not a problem of isolated economic theories, but of the underlying division of political power that was grounding the economy (Vellinga interview Reference Vellinga2009). He then turned to political scientists to understand the role of power, and familiarized himself with the work of leading sociologists. In retrospect, taking that approach gave him an enormous head start in addressing climate change problems.
In the midst of this main occupation with climate change, flood issues were still remotely on his radar. In 1995, he co-authored a report that explored the relation between climate change and river flooding (Weijers and Vellinga Reference Weijers and Pier1995). In newspapers he has often warned about the hydraulic consequences of climate change (more precipitation and river floodings). His background as an hydraulic engineer and his concern with climate change were seamlessly knit together in his analyses of what increased peak discharges would mean for river planning (Schmit Reference Schmit1995).
Marcel Stive: lobbying for coastal protection
Around the time of the river floods Stive became professor in coastal engineering at Delft University of Technology. As his focus was on coastal engineering and coastal morphology, the river floodings were not of imminent professional concern. The design of an artificial industry island, his project from the early 1980s, was taken off the shelf again in 1997 to give the prestige of Delft Hydraulics a boost. Stive was assigned to it and chose to come up with a multidisciplinary approach for an airport island. In his opinion, the plan was received well, and resulted in “Flyland,” an immense governmental study. However, public support and financial possibilities diminished and in May 2003 Flyland ended without leaving any material trace (Schultz van Haegen Reference Schultz van Haegen2003b; Stronkhorst Reference Stronkhorst2008). As I will come to explain below, Stive's experiences with artificial islands gave him a key position in a future politically heated debate.
Boosting Dutch national pride was just one of Stive's occupations in 1997; the other was his immense occupation with flood safety. In the Technical Advisory Committee on Waterworks (TAW) an emerging security issue was discussed: the increased force and the longer period of waves hitting the coast. The periods between the waves reaching the shoreline was increasing, and the force and duration of these waves increased accordingly. The problem was that the coastal dikes and dunes were not designed to withstand these longer wave periods. Media were pressing Stive to provide more information on this, but Stive did not need journalists to arouse his concern regarding the political agenda (Stive interview Reference Stive2009). In the arrangement between Delft, the TAW, and the Ministry of Water Management, Stive and the TAW had no trouble in bringing this problem to the attention of the public. The fact that Stive was high in the ranks of Delft University of Technology, that he belonged to the TAW, and that he did not go public with his concerns over the wave period, demonstrate that the arrangement channeled the concerns and ideas between science and government, and that he knew that communicating to the media could disturb this productive and efficient arrangement.
Huib de Vriend: river floods and the problems of design
Upon returning to his home discipline of river morphology as a Delft professor in 1995, Huib de Vriend joined the TAW as chair of the River Working Group.Footnote 7 From 1994 onwards he was also a member of the Netherlands Commission for Environmental Assessment (NCEA), the body that reviews the quality of environmental impact assessments. As a river morphologist who was involved in the TAW and the NCEA, de Vriend was seriously worried over the handling of the 1993–1995 events. The peak discharges and (near) floods created a demand for both his research and his interventions in river policy. His major concern was the neglect of river morphology in both the determination of design water discharge and the implementations in river management plans and actions based on these models. The 1995 peak discharges demonstrated that under such extreme circumstances, the river bed changes dramatically, and this changes the water flow. However, such factors were not included in the models that were used in the Room for Rivers design, which gave rise to a major design flaw (de Vriend interview Reference De Vriend2009).
Using his combined expertise in engineering and geosciences he raised awareness whenever he could, for example in NCEA and the TAW plenary meetings. These interventions had a common characteristic, namely that he kept things internal to these fora, a discussion from expert to expert, rather than “an uncontrollable process with the tabloids.” However, the impact was less than he hoped for (ibid.).
For him personally, these experiences increased not only his scientific expertise, but also his knowledge of policy and governance. They added to his appreciation of, and skillfulness in policy and government processes, language, and ways of thinking. He was taken by the discovery that there is more than “one truth,” and that other perspectives need to be embedded in civil engineering (ibid.). As he explains, he experienced engineering science in its societal context, and learned to integrate this in his relation to politics.
Han Vrijling: river floods and the problems of planning
In the case of Han Vrijling we find similar concerns about the way new designs for river management were developed. Vrijling, as illustrated by his earlier efforts to combine ecology with engineering, had no objections to new approaches to river management. However, he objected to what he perceived as flawed scientific underpinnings and the worrisome consequences for security and decision making. As the expertise of engineers failed to be sufficiently acknowledged in Room for Rivers, he felt that that the political and practical stability of decision making was under threat. Towards the close of the 1990s the ambitious sketches for Room for Rivers were drawn and it simultaneously became clear that many of the existing dikes and dunes did not meet the safety levels set by law (Schultz van Haegen 2003a and b). Vrijling became even more concerned. He objected to the project's wrong prioritizing (first nature, then security), wrong funding (building nature with security funds; spending money that was not available) and wrong budgeting (not including all the expected costs in the budgeting; ignoring cheaper options coming from traditional engineering) (Vrijling interview Reference Vrijling2010). He is now counted among the most ardent opponents of Room for Rivers, and Stive sometimes sides with him (e.g. Jongejan et al. Reference Jongejan, Vrijling, Stive and Jonkman2008).
In talking about this, during my interviews as well as in public, Vrijling put his comments of isolated cases, such as Room for Rivers, in a broader cultural, political, and economic constellation. “We live in a time that allows for ‘Rousseauian romanticism’ to flourish, in the form of expensive and unrealistic plans.” This contradicts his engineering disposition, an attitude that is based on the “water is a firm master” credo and recognizes the material, political, and economic limitations this imposes on engineering practices (ibid.).Footnote 8 Vrijling asserts that old (classic) and new engineering are not just at odds with one another, but they represent entirely different perspectives on politics, planning, and engineering science.
3.3 2003–2007: From politics to policy: expert advice in peril
An event that had a considerable impact on the role of engineering experts was a change in the advisory structure. The TAW was established in 1965 and since then had produced numerous authoritative reports, manuals, studies, and guides on primary waterworks.Footnote 9 The creation of the TAW meant that a forum had been established that allowed the Provinces, Rijkswaterstaat, engineers, and water boards to meet and discuss the technical planning and advice of water engineering projects. Beyond the production of technical reports, the TAW also aligned technical advice and the executive branch, bringing the two closer together.
Despite its effectiveness, in 2003 it was decided to discontinue the TAW in its present form.Footnote 10 As early as February 2004 the State Secretary announced a full reorganization of the advisory structure for water management (Schultz van Haegen Reference Schultz van Haegen2004). In June 2005, the TAW was officially dissolved (Staatscourant 2005), and replaced by the Expertise Network for Flood Protection (ENW). Its aims: to tie together all the expertise in hydraulic engineering, and to advise the Director-Generals of Water and Rijkswaterstaat (Janssen & De Haan Reference Janssen and de Haan2005). The most significant change was that the ENW, unlike the TAW, did not advise politicians, i.e. the Minister or State Secretary, but Director-Generals, the ones who execute decisions at the policy level. This was a hard nut to crack for the engineers, who were used to speaking to politicians. In December 2005 the new ENW was appointed (Staatscourant 2005b).Footnote 11
Against the backdrop of this changeover, the results from a nationwide assessment of primary waterworks shocked wide circles of engineers, political authorities, and citizens. In 2003, it appeared that 15 per cent of the primary waterworks did not stand up to the norms, and for some 35 per cent, the safety could not be determined (Schultz van Haegen Reference Schultz van Haegen2003a). This led to the concern that efforts aimed at creating new natural agents with Room for Rivers had resulted in a further decrease, rather than increase, in flood safety. The changeover of the TAW and the subsequent fierce debate on dike safety also shaped the Dutch response to Hurricane Katrina. Seen as an example of what might happen in the geographically comparable Netherlands, Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent failure of dikes and floodwalls protecting New Orleans in October 2005 re-ignited the debate on protection against the rising sea levels and peak discharges in rivers. In a Science article, in which a visit to New Orleans by Dutch scientists was reported, the clash between traditional engineering and ecological water managers was staged as “questioning the Dutch solution” (Bohannon and Enserink Reference Bohannon and Enserink2005; see also Wesselink Reference Wesselink2007).Footnote 12 All in all, the period 2003–2005 was rather tumultuous with significant changes in the political set up of advice and confronting flooding events. The discontinuation of the TAW and the concerns about flood safety affected the engineers’ policy agenda, and the narratives of these experts are converging at this moment in time. Each of the experts has his own explanation of, and response to, this transformation.
Pier Vellinga: return to flood safety
For Pier Vellinga, who until then only addressed flood safety in the broader framework of climate change, the discontinuation of the TAW was a moment when he re-engaged with the field. The change was induced by an invitation for the 2003 Erasmus lecture, organized by the Dutch section of the Club of Rome (Vellinga interview Reference Vellinga2009).
While preparing for this lecture Vellinga was drawn back into the science and politics of flood safety; it proved an alarming exercise. The incongruence between the security norms set by law, plummeting budgets, and the actual state of the dike systems were concerns he could not fail to address alongside his interest in climate change. In his lecture he advocated coping with climate change consequences such as heavier storms and increased precipitation in an adaptive manner, step by step, and he called for billions of Euros to be invested in the coming decades. But Vellinga also raised the question as to whether or not the traditional approach to dealing with flood safety really was the only one available (Vellinga Reference Vellinga and van State2003). In the public sphere, he increasingly drew the public's attention to flood safety. In 2003, for example, exactly 50 years after the disastrous 1953 flooding, the TAW and Vellinga addressed the problematic state of the Dutch flood defenses during a TV documentary (Zembla 2003). Vellinga called for a new Delta Committee to deal with the issue of climate change and sea level rise, and used Hurricane Katrina in support of that (Kabat et al., 17 November Reference Kabat, Van Vierssen, Veraart, Vellinga and Aerts2005). However, he did not use Katrina as an example to reinforce practices of traditional engineering, as others did, but to present new concepts (such as climate proofing) for protecting a flood-prone country like the Netherlands.
Overall, he felt he was in a unique position to address these issues (Vellinga interview Reference Vellinga2009). His position as an informed outsider and scientist with expertise in relevant policy domains granted him both authority and freedom, as well as skills, to take up a leading position in the debate. In this episode, he worked as an entrepreneur and as a campaigner for this particular issue.
Marcel Stive: the disapproved expert
For Marcel Stive, the transformation of the TAW soon resulted in his changed attitude towards the media. Although he stayed loyal to the ENW he also, albeit modestly, started giving interviews to journalists as a way to compensate for loss of influence. For example, in March 2005, he created a stir by going public with data that indicated a number of weak spots in the Dutch coastal protection (Stive interview Reference Stive2009). Unwillingly, he was quoted on the front page of a popular national newspaper under the heading Dunes are too weak. “The chance of flooding is larger than calculated, and sea level rise still has to enter the picture,” Stive was reported to have said (Van de Crommert Reference Van de Crommert2005). Stive was taken by surprise by this dramatic publicity, and feared that readers would take him for a prophet of doom. Although he was critical, he also had a concern for how others, the Ministry in particular, would judge his actions. Despite the fact that his criticism rose from a concern about the safety of the Netherlands, he wanted to be careful in how he expressed these concerns to the outside world. Stive was far from calculative and just wanted to give an impulse to change, not to direct policy processes in the strict sense (Stive interview Reference Stive2009). Stive's intervention yielded a dual response. Rijkswaterstaat refuted the allegations and claimed that they were already aware of the problem; indeed, he said that Stive himself relied upon Rijkswaterstaat research. But in the ensuing months, the vice chancellor of Stive's university referred to this incident as an example of how authoritative expert opinions were ignored by politicians (Anon. 2005).
Hurricane Katrina was used by Stive to indicate the precarious position of the Netherlands. For example, he and Vrijling co-authored an editorial entitled: New Orleans is a Lesson to the Dutch (Jonkman, Stive, and Vrijling Reference Jonkman, Stive and Vrijling2005). On national television he is said to have claimed, also during Katrina, that the Netherlands is not yet Delta proof, a claim that can be taken as a serious criticism of flood safety.
Huib de Vriend: navigating between power and influence
Just before the dismantling of the TAW, de Vriend joined the board of Delft Hydraulics as Science and Technology director in 2002, where he occupied a strategic position between science and politics. In addition to the already noted reorganization of the sector advisory councils, de Vriend identified another factor that led to the dismantling of the TAW: the council's critical stance on a river management issue. In the discussion on Room for Rivers, which had the aim of creating more capacity for water storage and water flow, one of the proposed solutions was to create overflow areas. In May 2002, a governmental committee issued advice on this, and the TAW was rather critical. According to de Vriend, that triggered the discontinuation of the TAW (de Vriend interview Reference De Vriend2009). He first responded in anger, and together with the other three professors in the TAW he threatened to step down. But when the dust had settled, successful efforts were made to convince them to give the new ENW a chance.
In the context of Katrina, he expressed criticism about the Dutch security situation. In the Washington Post he criticized the Dutch way of calculating safety and the failure to take proper account of developments like climate change (Moore Reference Moore2005). He did not, however, use Katrina for agenda setting. That was due to his outlook on policy-making processes. He disapproved of the media route to policy. Rather, issues should be handled between experts, with a clear view on the longer term processes and relations (de Vriend interview Reference De Vriend2009). Furthermore, in 2005 he was not that upset anymore by the change of the TAW into the ENW. De Vriend was therefore not as “charged” by the crisis of political legitimacy, but instead experienced it as a blessing in disguise. All things being considered, he believed the present ENW had more influence than the old TAW; the ENW did not only receive more solicitations for advice, he also believed its advisory reports had more impact on policy and research programs. De Vriend was now explicitly positive about it; the old situation of advising the State Secretary was far from ideal, for it was shadow boxing with civil servants who executed the political decision (ibid.).
Han Vrijling: the end of engineers’ hegemony
Vrijling's account of why the TAW changed to the ENW confirms the diagnoses from Stive and de Vriend. One of the formal reasons for the State Secretary's announcement in 2004, says Vrijling, was that too many of her civil servants were in the TAW, implying she would be advised by her own staff.Footnote 13 However, the informal reason may have been that she was irritated by public criticism of the TAW chairman on the leeway in dike maintenance.
Besides changing the recipient of the ENW advice, Vrijling observed that more diverse types of expertise were involved with what used to be engineering matters, even in the ENW. With mockery in his tone, he wondered whether it was philosophically possible that a sociologist be responsible at the Ministry of the security of the dikes.Footnote 14 In response to the “degradation” of expert advice, Vrijling also resorted to what was considered to be an unorthodox measure to get a hold on decision making: shooting from the outside. Following the TAW's demise he made it clear to politicians that now that expert advice was no longer embedded in the traditional domain of power, he would change his way of communicating on risk issues. This, he said, would have been unimaginable in the TAW days (Vrijling interview Reference Vrijling2009). From the increase in his appearances in the written media since 2003, we see this effectuated instantaneously. In the context of Vrijling's earlier discomfort with flood security in the Netherlands, Katrina is mentioned in passing as an event that could further his case. In a direct sense he referred to Katrina as an example of what might happen when the Dutch dike system continued to be ignored (Jonkman and Vrijling Reference Jonkman and Vrijling2005). In an indirect manner he attacked the Dutch for drawing political lessons from Katrina. His intervention towards politics was a critical article in a policy journal (Jongejan, Vrijling, and Jonkman Reference Jongejan, Vrijling and Jonkman2008), after which the Dutch Government dropped the idea of the so-called safety chain (safety as a series of chains, such as damage prevention, damage limitation, and so forth) (Vrijling interview Reference Vellinga2009). A debate on flood insurance, in which the government praised the American insurance schemes (Wesselink Reference Wesselink2007), was a similar story: being banned from the center of the discussion Vrijling cum suis had no other alternative but to target the discussion from outside with an ENW letter (ENW 2008) and an accompanying study that demonstrated the unfeasibility of mass insurance (Vrijling Reference Vrijling2008a). The single blow is said to have resulted in the dropping of the plans (Vrijling interview Reference Vrijling2010).Footnote 15 Vrijling was therefore a critical observer who managed to make some important adjustments to policy.
3.4 2007-present: Planning without flooding: the era of the Delta report
All the agenda-setting work of these and other scientists following the alarming assessment of the dike system, the expected sea level rise, increased precipitation, and the example set by Hurricane Katrina impacted Dutch politics. Now that the river delta would be made climate proof with Room for Rivers, the time had come to develop a sustainable coastal policy (Huizinga-Heringa Reference Huizinga-Heringa2007). In 2007, the decision was taken to install a “deltacommittee” “to come up with recommendations, not because a disaster has occurred, but rather to avoid it. The nature of the advice requested is also unusual: to present an integrated vision for the Netherlands for centuries to come” (Deltacommittee 2008). Again, it was an episode that drew the four engineers into the political arena.
Pier Vellinga: the engineer in disguise
After the 2003 Erasmus lecture and his campaign for climate proofing, Vellinga made a comeback to the domain of water engineering, and started to lobby for a Delta Committee. Once the Delta Committee had been appointed and sat down to its task, it had an interesting job for Vellinga: to cooperate with the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) to produce up-to-the-minute climate change scenarios, including the extremes. Producing sea level rise scenario's with the KNMI was a challenge: since Vellinga got involved in climate change in the 1980s, he and the KNMI had enjoyed a love-hate relationship, as they regarded him as an outsider to climate science (Vellinga interview Reference Vellinga2009). Despite these border conflicts, Vellinga and his subcommittee managed to plan probability scenarios in case of sea level rise. The high end scenario predicted a sea level rise of 1.3 meters by 2100. However, the chairman of the Delta report presented 1.3 meters not as the high end scenario, but simply as the scenario. It caused an upheaval, and the internationally renowned experts from Vellinga's subcommittee protested in public.
In 2008, during the production of the Delta report, Vellinga left the Institute for Environmental Studies where he had been since 1991, and moved to Wageningen University and Research Center. Over the last few years, he has moved himself into a position in which he directed large research programs into climate change and water management. He is both vice chair of the Climate Change Spatial Planning program (started in 2004), as well as scientific director of the Knowledge for Climate program (started in 2007). The programs are multidisciplinary and span diverse climate change related problems. One might say that with these programs, Vellinga has continued to weld his renewed interest in hydraulic engineering together with his later passion for climate change.
The revived engagement with hydraulic engineering culminated in a conceptual idea that since then is Vellinga's pet idea: the broad dikes. With a width of 300 meters, these dikes are not only unbreakable; they are also a host to attractive recreating and housing possibilities. Vellinga believes that it is a much better way of protecting against the water then the “thin lines in the landscape,” a strange relic of the Middle Ages (Vellinga interview Reference Vrijling2009). The concept of broad dikes was not just presented to the outside world; it was launched in the media as an alternative to the idea of raising dikes (Schreuder Reference Schreuder2008). This last example illustrates Vellinga's self-image as conceptual thinker in engineering.
Marcel Stive: fitting engineering science with politics
When he was invited to a place in the Delta Committee, Stive was surprised by the fact that this committee was appointed without a clear triggering event, such as the floods of 1953 and 1916 before. That the Delta Committee would not be a traditional civil engineering enterprise was clear from the outset, and this was also reflected in the composition of the committee: Stive was the sole civil engineer. The responsibility of producing a report that was sound and acceptable for the Dutch community of civil engineers rested upon his shoulders (Stive interview Reference Stive2009). The challenge was even greater, as Veerman had openly expressed his support for artificial islands for recreation or windmills, and this idea was embraced by the Dutch Prime Minister (Korevaar Reference Korevaar2007). Indeed, artificial islands were the showpiece of Veerman's Christian Democratic Alliance. The image of a tulip-shaped island was born. But engineers such as Vrijling and Stive believed it was a terribly bad idea.Footnote 16 Due to his long experience with industrial and airport islands, Stive knew artificial islands were only viable with a strong business case. And the Tulip's business was rather meagre in view of the immense investments required.
He first had to convince the Veerman Committee. A coastline extension of 200 per cent, with no business case to finance the expected maintenance, and little extra effect for national security were needles that pierced the balloon of tulip islands. In the committee “it took just an hour” for Stive to explain why artificial islands for housing, agriculture, and recreation were objectionable (Stive interview Reference Stive2009). That, however, created a second problem: translating this committee standpoint in such a way that it would not harm the Dutch Prime Minister's reputation as champion of the Tulip Island. A clash between Balkenende and Veerman, between two prominent Christian Democrats, should be avoided at all cost. In a coordinated effort, Stive and Veerman delicately wrote an appendix in the report (Deltacommittee 2008: appendix 5:125–8) that refuted the idea for an island without a loss of face for the Prime Minister (Stive interview Reference Stive2009).
As a member of the Delta Committee, Stive had also experienced chairman Veerman and his faux pas with sea level rise. It called for some maintenance; Veerman and another member corrected it in a newspaper article (Fresco and Veerman Reference Fresco2008), and Stive always corrected this when he lectured on the second Delta Committee (Stive interview Reference Stive2009).
After his experiences with the Delta Committee, Stive said he experienced a radical change in his perception of the world of science and policy. Witnessing how the Delta Committee's chair Veerman fluently knit together scientific facts with the interests of politics, rubbed off on Stive. His work with the Delta Committee had changed him from a scientific rationalist (believing in the linearity of the science-policy relation) to a political realist, someone who acknowledged that the world of science functions according to a different logic than society (ibid.). Together with Wiebe Bijker, he is now also member of the scientific advisory board of the new institute Building with Nature (see below).
Huib de Vriend: tying crucial strings together
Following a research assessment in 2008, Delft Hydraulics merged with other institutes to form Deltares. As former director of Delft Hydraulics, Huib de Vriend was appointed as its scientific director, a unique and politicized position. With respect to the Delta Committee, Huib de Vriend's involvement was mainly institutional: Deltares did some of the background research. Notwithstanding this minimal input, he was more involved and occupied with working out the plans proposed in the Delta report. His directing of Delft Hydraulics and Deltares and his membership in the ENW maneuvered him into a position where he could align the policy agendas with the knowledge agenda.
Following the Delta report, Huib de Vriend articulated voids in scientific knowledge, and his institute navigated its research program to gain the knowledge needed to realize the Delta program (de Vriend interview Reference De Vriend2009). One of his own scientific merits is Building with Nature, a program that combines engineering challenges with natural dynamics, geoscience, engineering, and ecology. In these and other narrated events, Huib de Vriend presented himself as someone who is continuously expanding his expertise, not just in engineering, but also in governing and managing the public dimension of engineering works.
Han Vrijling: champion of old engineering
Although Vrijling and Stive worked just two doors away from each other, they never discussed the Delta Committee while it was producing its report. Vrijling's involvement was that of a critic. In part the critique was a continuation of his opinions on water management in general, but he also extensively criticized the Delta report itself. Vrijling's first critique came just days before the report was printed. He was consulted on a new definition of risk. When they wanted to advise that the maximum number of casualties should be limited to “100,” he railed against them asserting that it was a risk definition that lacked any relation to existing risk definitions. One or two days before the report was printed, they adopted the general definition (ibid.; Deltacommittee 2008; appendix 4:118–125), which “was written with the pen of old engineering” (Vrijling interview Reference Vrijling2010).
Vrijling's second response came shortly after the report was published in September 2008. In a magazine article for agricultural engineers, he addressed some fundamental inconsistencies of the report (Vrijling Reference Vrijling2008b). One such inconsistency was that in certain flood-prone areas people were encouraged to move away, whereas other areas, such as floodplains, should be inhabited more. Another is that in the Zeeland area, the Committee proposed that fresh water reserves be given over to salinization, whereas elsewhere the Committee wanted to increase the stock of freshwater because of expected shortages. Vrijling had little sympathy for these wild, contradictory and, above all, costly plans (Vrijling interview Reference Vellinga2009). What concerned Vrijling most, was that the report did not explicitly mention the poor state of the dike system, and the need to do something about it. Another mistake was its failure to include the economic function of the water system in its report (Vrijling interview Reference Vrijling2010).
Beyond the Dutch dimension of the Delta report, Vrijling was also concerned about its international presentation. The Delta approach of the Netherlands is now being exported to Vietnam, New York, and other locations around the world, but it is not the hydraulic engineers who act as ambassadors. Sociologists, geographers, and agricultural engineers have taken over from civil engineers; civil engineers have lost power on that front line as well (ibid.). For Vrijling the ultimate fruit of the environmental approach to engineering lies in the political decline of traditional engineering.
At present, Vrijling is still active is various committees and projects, and in that capacity works in a field of engineering that has to appropriate other expertises, policy perspectives, and views on how to “engineer” the Netherlands. But in this process he is cynical, perhaps even embittered. Unlike Vellinga, who integrated engineering with climate science quite early on, and unlike Stive and de Vriend who have discovered new vistas of governing and of engineering, Vrijling remains a partisan who is fighting “new” engineering whenever and wherever he can.
4. Conclusion: Boundary work, identity work, and the construction of political credibility of experts
In this article I analyzed how four experts in engineering (Pier Vellinga, Marcel Stive, Huib de Vriend, and Han Vrijling) endeavored to maintain a credible position in a context where the configuration of expertise was changing. Other fields of expertise, ranging from ecology to political science, became influential in the flood safety policy arena. By approaching expertise as a relational category (Collins and Evans Reference Collins and Evans2007; Wynne Reference Wynne1992), this presence of new fields of expertise implied that the role of traditional engineering expertise changed accordingly. This presented a challenge to their scientific and political authority, and hence affected the policy and research agenda for flood safety.
By presenting biographical analyses of the personal histories of four civil engineers, seniors in their field and advisors to politics and the public on flood protection and water policy, I have analyzed how engineers handled these scientific and political challenges. These challenges were dual: how to attain and retain leading positions as advisors to government policy, and able to influence the dominant policy frames; and how to handle the scientific and political challenges to their credibility, keeping a close eye on the boundaries of disciplines in science and politics.
The traditional relations between engineering science and politics created an arrangement in which the engineers could address politicians directly, and in which they had almost full jurisdiction over engineering affairs (Abbott Reference Abbott1988). But with the rise of competing frameworks for flood protection from the 1980s onwards, the Ministry of Water Management relies on experts who do not solely belong to engineering science, and where interests other than those for flood protection are valued. These changes instigated these experts to adopt new perspectives on and strategies for policymaking.
By employing a biographical-narrative approach, I have come to understand how, by articulating and reformulating the boundaries of their political and scientific work, these engineers aimed to keep jurisdiction over water engineering policy. After briefly summarizing the findings of this empirical analysis, I will specify this in terms of boundary work and identity work.
Pier Vellinga, the first engineer studied here, demonstrates a high level of responsiveness to environmental problems in general, and climate problems in particular. Since 2003, he has actively worked on both fronts under the denominator of “climate proofing the Netherlands,” but with an open eye on flood protection. Vellinga, for example, coupled it with spatial planning and climate change, and thus forged a link between this Dutch debate on flood safety and the global scientific and political discussion on climate change. He saw himself as a pioneer between science and policy, stimulated by his work experiences in both sectors.
Marcel Stive and Huib de Vriend represent a more or less intermediary attitude. They never left the field of engineering, and have been mainly involved in modeling the river delta and the coastal zone. From their positions and expertise they have engaged with policymaking recognizing that their role was to be important, but not dominant. Over the years, they have acquired new skills, new perspectives, new conceptual frameworks, and they have become more open to the dynamics of decision-making processes involving multiple stakeholders and multiple interests. This appreciation is translated in, for example, the work of engineering institute Deltares. Stive and de Vriend have both contributed to a further integration of ecology and engineering by developing new approaches to ecological engineering, such as Building with Nature.
Han Vrijling, the final engineer studied in this article, refers to himself as a “fossil.” He occupies a critical position vis-à-vis the environmental approach to engineering and the growing political importance of other scientific disciplines, and continues to firmly identify himself with the traditional approach. Having worked on the storm-surge barrier that embodied the onset of the ecological turn (Disco Reference Disco2002), his main criticism is not that ecology and engineering cannot be combined, but that the present ecology-oriented development is promoted at the expense of flood safety, which creates various problems in terms of planning and budgeting. Despite the fact that Vrijling's role in shaping this debate is partly that of maintaining the dichotomy of classic and ecological engineering, his interventions have in fact contributed to a more robust policy.
By virtue of a methodology that highlights the individual narratives and learning experiences, this article supplements our understanding of boundary work and identity work in three respects. It enables us to discern between generational and individual aspects of boundary work; it demonstrates how views on the science-policy and science public interfaces are enacted; and it describes first and second order reflection (Rip Reference Rip2006) in the course of an expert's career.
From a generational perspective (Hagendijk Reference Hagendijk1996, 162–165), important findings are that first of all this generation has faced similar challenges, and the experts have been involved with these challenges for a larger part of their career. Secondly, ruptures do exist: the generation of period of education covers all four experts, but if one looks at the working experience, Vrijling explicitly stands out: he is the sole engineer of these four who has worked on the Deltaworks, and is perhaps one of the last of a previous generation. Finally, that differentiation within this generation takes place on yet another plane: individual views and experiences of the science-policy and science-society interfaces.
Hence, the notion of generations in science can be scrutinized, and demarcations of generations can be specified by looking at the boundary work of these experts. From this conclusion, the role of identity and identity work becomes more evident. The variation amongst this “generation” of experts in responding to the changing configuration of expert advice, is, as we have seen, to a significant extent inspired by the expert's self-perception of his abilities, views on and experiences with the boundaries between disciplines, between science and policy and between science and society, the reflective abilities and the capacity for first-order and second-order learning from these experiences.
Views of experts on the science policy boundary has been systematically studied in other contexts (Hoppe Reference Hoppe2009; Huitema and Turnhout Reference Huitema and Turnhout2009), and this shows how experts, even in a context where science-policy boundaries are well-articulated, give their own twist to perceiving those boundaries. Although this article does not provide ethnographical evidence on how experts have enacted their views on boundaries in practice, such as committee meetings, public debates, and parliamentary inquiries, it has, from the perspective of the experts, related views of boundary work to acting on those boundaries.
As such this linkage between views and actions of individual experts supplements our understanding of boundary work. It has one further merit worth discussing, and that is the fact that in the narrative interviews, experts gave evidence of their reflection and learning in that process. Although for me as an analyst it was difficult to ascertain whether this learning took place at the time of the interview (post hoc reflections) or at the time of the narrated events, it does give insight into first-order learning (not changing one's views but perfecting one's acting from existing views) and second-order learning (changing one's views and hence one's action as an expert). Narrative interviews following specific events can both circumvent the problem of post hoc reflections, and stimulate the active reflection of experts whilst this person is engaging with particular challenges. Hence, the biographical-narrative method has virtues as both a research methodology and as a tool for reflection-in-action.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Pier Vellinga, Marcel Stive, Huib de Vriend, and Han Vrijling for their willingness to participate in this study. Furthermore, the anonymous reviewers, the editors from Science in Context, as well as Hans Marks and Hub Zwart provided valuable suggestions that resulted in numerous improvements to the original paper.
