Speaker
Description
Key words: drought adaptation, policy arrangements, water retention, uncertainty, comparative case study
Introduction
Drought adaptation requires space for water retention measures in rural areas (Pan et al., 2018). Due to the high population density in urbanizes areas such as the Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium), these spatial measures affect many different actors and sectors (Didde, 2021; Poelmans & Van Rompaey, 2009). Considering that drought is a relatively new water-related challenge for the Netherlands and Flanders, this leads to uncertainties around the roles of different actors and sectors in dealing with drought, often beyond their organizational borders.
Through these uncertainties, new collaborations and alliances emerge between actors. Actors play a crucial role in navigating these uncertainties, because they make decisions, mobilize resources, negotiate trade-offs between competing interests and land uses, and coordinate actions needed to address these uncertainties and implement adaptation measures. Therefore, understanding the role of actors and how they relate to governance dimensions such as existing rules, discourses, resource availability, and power dynamics is becoming more important (La Jeunesse & Larrue, 2020; Omari Motsumi et al., 2023; Termeer et al., 2011).
To better understand how actors navigate these governance dimensions and shape drought adaptation processes, the Policy Arrangements Approach (PAA) provides a useful analytical framework. This theoretical approach was developed by Arts & Leroy (2006) and has been applied in several policy fields, such as public space management, urban forestry, housing, to study a specific governance context, including actors and their interactions (Ben Brik, 2026; Duivenvoorden & Hartmann, 2025; Quaglia & Aalbers, 2026). Also in water management studies, the importance and challenges of cross-sectoral governance have been analysed, touching upon the role of actors and providing an institutional perspective (Omari Motsumi et al., 2023; van Montfoort & Lulofs, 2025). However, policy arrangements are often used for describing the governance context, while an understanding of how they govern actor behaviour remains unclear. In this paper, we therefore build on Liefferink (2006)’s work, which introduces an extension to the PAA framework focusing on interactions of actors with the governance context, which has not been applied to water or drought management yet.
Thus, this study has the aim to 1) map the policy arrangement of water retention measures for drought adaptation, and 2) study how actors shape and are shaped by these policy arrangements. It employs the Policy Arrangements Approach (PAA) as both a descriptive and an analytical framework. It adopts a qualitative comparative case study approach in the Netherlands and Flanders to analyse how different governance contexts and institutional backgrounds shape actors and the policy arrangements in which they operate. The paper describes the discourses, rules of the game, power and resources, and actors and coalitions in water retention for drought adaptation in the Netherlands and Flanders, and then analyses the relationships between the ‘actors and coalitions’ dimension and the other dimensions. This extends theoretical insights into the relation between actors and their governance context in the case of drought adaptation on the one hand, and on the other hand might help policymakers and practitioners facilitate the implementation of drought adaptation measures that enhance long-term water resilience.
Theoretical framework
Environmental issues are often considered a shared responsibility to be solved by multiple actors across different sectors (Arts & Leroy, 2006). The Policy Arrangements Approach (PAA) was developed to study institutional change and stability within these new decision-making processes in governance or, as the framework calls it, policy arrangements. A policy arrangement (PA) is a temporary stabilization of a certain policy regime and consists of four dimensions that shape the PA:
- Discourses: norms, values, views on problems and solutions,
- Actors and coalitions: the actors involved in a specific policy field and the coalitions they form,
- Rules of the game: formal rules, e.g. laws and formal procedures, and informal rules, e.g. routines of interaction,
- Power and resources: power dynamics within actors based on the resources available to them.
Although criticized for being too descriptive, the PAA allows studying relations between these descriptive dimensions, turning it into an analytical tool. Liefferink (2006) provides an indication of how to do this by formulating an analytical approach to policy arrangements, but application of this framework to cases of environmental or spatial management is lacking.
Considering the focus of this paper, the ‘actors and coalitions’ dimension is chosen as a starting point. This dimension relates to the other ones through discourse coalitions, relational power, and interaction rules. To clarify how governance dimensions shape actor behaviour, each of these relationships is explored in the following paragraphs.
A discourse, also called a storyline, is “an ensemble of ideas, concepts and categories through which meaning is given to social and physical phenomena” (Hajer & Versteeg, 2005:175). Discourse coalitions exist based on the framing and shared understanding of the policy issue and the continuously learning and developing values through interactions (Hajer, 1995; Leroy & Arts, 2006; Nam et al., 2026). Other authors point to the creation of storylines through a strong, shared language (Díaz-Pont & del Val Alonso, 2026).
Liefferink (2006) considers relational power to come from resource dependency, first described in this way by Emerson (1962). He argued that the power that A has over B is equal to the amount of dependency of B towards A. Resources may be exchanged between actor A and B, therefore changing the dependency and thus power dynamics. However, in an exchange network, actor B might reduce dependency on actor A through an exchange relationship with other actors in the network (Cook, 1977). Literature on drought governance suggests that hierarchical roles exist and influence the ability of actors to use resources (Bressers et al., 2016; Petersen-Perlman et al., 2022). This might depend on geographical location or sociopolitical context in which actors are operating.
The final relationship is interaction rules, which refers to how and to what extent actors interact with each other or relating to the environmental policy that they are concerned with. Interaction rules are studied in, for example, the work of Kooiman et al. (2008) and his conceptualization of co-governance, which entails that “societal parties join hands with a common purpose in mind, and stake their identities and autonomy to this process” (p. 9). In drought governance, this type of governance often relies on voluntary participation from actors, making interaction rules a key element of policy arrangements (De Waegemaeker & Fosselle, 2025; Kaufmann & Wiering, 2019).
Methods
This paper is a qualitative, comparative case study that employs interviews, documents, and academic papers for data collection and different coding techniques for data analysis. Its comparative nature lies in the similar physical circumstances of the Netherlands and Flanders, while the governance context differs. Two cases are chosen for comparison: the river basin of Water Authority Rijn and IJssel (Waterschap Rijn en IJssel) in the Netherlands and of the Demer Basin (Demerbekken) in Flanders. Method triangulation is used to gather evidence from multiple types of sources, in this case interviews, policy and planning documents and academic articles, which provides a better understanding of the complex issue (Moran-Ellis et al., 2006). A broad range of actors are selected for interviews:
- National government
- Province
- Municipality
- Water authorities
- Site management organisation
- Nature/landscape organisations
- Farmer representative organisation
- Drinking water companies
The coding process is divided into two parts corresponding to the two aims of the study, based on coding strategies for developing grounded theory. However, the selective coding round follows broad categories from the theoretical framework of the PAA and is therefore not meant to develop new theory. The coding process consists of multiple, reiterative coding rounds based on the principles of open, axial and selective coding (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). For the first part, new codes are created from the raw data in the open coding round. Then, a round of axial coding organizes these codes into categories and concepts. Selective coding is performed to group these categories and concepts based on the PAA dimensions. The second part is related to the second aim of this study and follows a similar coding sequence as the first part. After new codes are created in the open coding round, and further grouped in the axial coding round, Liefferink's (2006) relationships are used as categories during selective coding.
Expected results
The result section is expected to consist of two parts: first a description of the current policy arrangement of water retention for drought adaptation from the Netherlands and Flanders, structured by the four PAA dimensions. This description is accompanied by a schematization of actors on the levels at which they operate. Financial flows are included in the schematization with arrows. The second part is an analysis of the interactions between the ‘actors and coalitions’ and other dimensions in the Netherlands and Flanders, structured by the interactions in the analytical approach of Liefferink (2006).
Discussion and conclusion
The discussion contains the comparative element of this paper, where the policy arrangements and dimension interactions described in the results are examined. Implications of certain arrangements are made clear through this comparison. Some preliminary points of discussion are:
- Diverging financial flows in the Netherlands and Flanders and how labelling them influences implementation potential
- The way that actors are in contact with each other, either through policy tables (the Netherlands) or coordinators (Flanders)
- To what extent water authorities are institutionalized and the influence of this institutionalization on the way that water retention measures can be implemented
- The role of European directives, such as the Water Framework Directive, on the way that problems and solutions are framed differently in the Netherlands and Flanders
- Potential policy lock-ins because of actors unwilling to act as long as other actors do not act
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