Transition experiments in Amsterdam

Conceptual and empirical analysis of two transition experiments in the WATERgraafsmeer program

by Nadia Lugt

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The city of Amsterdam is faced with substantial challenges in maintaining urban living quality. Increasing societal involvement and inflexibility of the urban governance system have ceased progress in water management, ecological quality and sustainability. In the Watergraafsmeer area, a low-lying urban polder area in the eastern part of Amsterdam, these issues are perceived as persistent. Under the flag of the WATERgraafsmeer program transition management is adopted as a governance approach to change and water management is taken as the key carrier for sustainable development. In transition management, experimenting is a vital activity and transitions experiments are designed to assure their contribution to change. In this research, transition experiments in the Watergraafsmeer area are analyzed, using the mechanisms of deepening, broadening and scaling-up and their operationalization in 11 project characteristics. The research is based on an analysis of primary sources on the WATERgraafsmeer program. The case studies show that WATERgraafsmeer functions well as a transition experiment. They also show how the overall program and local project support each other in their quest for sustainable development. Furthermore we conclude that the management guidelines for transition experiments fail to accommodate interaction processes between project and program and lacks attention for substance.