Supporting sustainable urban planning and development: three approaches

Cities are among the most complex of man-made systems. Interventions in these systems are never simple. The essential cooperation between all stakeholders can be improved by tools that clarify urban development processes and quantify impacts. TNO and its partners have developed three promising decision support systems

The sour and sweet grapes of an institutional transition: Impacts of institutional transition on public policy design in water management sector in the Netherlands

The last decade a general shift has been realized in the water management sector in the Netherlands. The shift from a top-down (cooperative monopoloid) to a bottom-up institutional setting (cooperative multi-centric) was accompanied by various effects on the societal context. The benefits of the institutional shift do not only involve the most important actors (e.g. the Ministry of Transport and Water Management, the Municipalities) but also allows them to achieve their goals. The disadvantages of the institutional shift concern the long duration of the policy design process since issues and perceptions are steered in multiple phases and negotiated at all levels of institutional structuration. These undesirable effects can be considered as the impacts of the institutional transitions and can be alleviated by a more thorough design of the policy design process along the administrative layers as well as by the sustaining of openness and diversity of actors in the policy design process. The fruitful cooperative climate between the involved administrative bodies of water management sectors need to be conserved for forthcoming water policy challenges

Apprentissage expérimental afin de percevoir les comportements stratégiques dans les projets de grande envergure

International audienceAnalytical techniques for project management, such as CPM, PERT, cost estimation, and budgeting, are widely applied in business. Especially when used in large scale projects, these techniques are sensitive to strategic stakeholder behaviour. High costs, long duration, high technological uncertainty, and high diversity of contractors that have to co-operate, are characteristics that are intrinsic to large scale projects and can be abused by contractors to maximise their own interests. The project management game presented in this paper provides a context for experimental learning about strategic contractor behaviour. Although stylised and simplified, the game evokes patterns of behaviour of project managers and contractors that are sufficiently realistic to draw important lessons about the possibilities and limits of analytical techniques in large scale projects

Comparaison de performances dans la gestion de l'eau urbaine au Pays-Bas: une évaluation

Benchmarking is increasingly adopted as a means for performance improvement in the public sector. In the Netherlands, umbrella organisations of different actors in the urban water chain (drinking water companies, municipalities, and water boards) have implemented their own benchmarking process. This parallel and apparently independent development gave rise to the concern that the overall efficiency of the water chain might decrease when actors focus only on their own performance indicators. Analysis of the three benchmarks revealed a gap between these indicators and the policy objectives set by the Dutch national government. To assess the stakes of uncoordinated action, the objectives and policy instruments of the three aforementioned actors plus drinking water consumers and the national government were identified and represented in causal models, which were then used to infer resource dependence and potential for synergy. The results show that the actors can significantly affect each other's performance, but also suggest that an overall win-win stragegy can be found

La conception dans le développement des systèmes socio-techniques: trois perspectives dans un cadre commun

International audienceLarge-scale socio-technical systems, such as infrastructures for transport, energy and telecommunication, are not designed and then constructed according to plan. Rather, they develop over a long period of time as a result of countless changes. Nonetheless, most of these changes have been produced by design. Three types of designs ? system design, decision process design, and institutional design ? are identified as pertinent to large-scale socio-technical systems, and characterised by applying a generic conceptual framework to a fictitious case. This characterisation provides some insights into the variety of design problems that must be addressed in the context of socio-technical system development

Analyse de contextes politiques multi-acteurs en utilisant des graphes de perception

Policy making is a multi-actor process: it involves a variety of actors, each trying to further their own interests. How these actors decide and act largely depends on the way they perceive the policy problem. This paper describes Dynamic Actor Network Analysis (DANA), a graph-based method/tool to analyze a policy context by modeling how actors view a policy issue. Each actor view is modeled as a perception graph, a type of causal map that represents the (probabilistic) relations between goals, policy actions and external influences. Cross-comparison of these perception graphs reveals properties of the multi-actor policy network, such as factor relevance, resource dependency, conflict, and possible tradeoffs. Although DANA models technically have the potential for simulating policy scenarios, some interesting methodological problems remain

An environment to support problem solving

Technology, Policy and Managemen

Engineering Systems in Flux: Designing and Evaluating Interventions in Dynamic Systems

This chapter discusses the threefold challenge of designing effective interventions in engineering systems that are constantly changing: (1) a designed socio-technical artefact should improve system performance not only under present conditions, but it must also be functional when conditions change, be it autonomously or due to interventions performed by others, and (2) the actual intervention of implementing the artefact should be planned such that it does not disrupt functional processes elsewhere, while (3) the implementation process should be impervious to such contingent processes. To meet this challenge, engineers can deploy different strategies: design strategies that will enhance the robustness of an artefact, its flexibility, or its capacity for (planned) evolution; strategies that will stabilise the context of the artefact; and implementation strategies that will contain and shield the intervention. This chapter reviews these strategies, discusses how they relate to systems engineering methodologies, and then highlights exploratory modeling and participatory modeling as methods for ex ante evaluation of interventions in dynamic engineering systems.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Policy Analysi