A common ground? Constructing and exploring scenarios for infrastructure network-of-networks

Contemporary infrastructure networks require large investments especially due to aging. Investment opportunities of network-of-networks are often obscured because current scenarios often concern single infrastructure networks. Major barriers to the construction and use of network-of-networks scenarios are institutional fragmentation and the disconnection of scenario-development phases. This paper aims to construct and enhance the use of network-of-networks scenarios through a participatory scenario process. We employed a hybrid-method approach comprising document analysis, Disaggregative Policy Delphi, and futures-oriented workshop for five large national infrastructure administrations in the Netherlands. This approach yielded twelve key infrastructure developments for which 28 infrastructure experts provided future estimates. We constructed seven scenarios through cluster analysis of experts’ quantitative estimates, qualitative direct content analysis of the qualitative data, and a futures table. The scenarios are: Infraconomy; Techno-Pessimism; Safety; Technological; Missed Boat; Hyperloop; and Green. Our results stress the importance of collaboration: desired scenarios are improbable when infrastructure administrations maintain their current sectoral perspective, whereas an inter-sectoral perspective may generate more investment opportunities. However, these network-of-networks investment opportunities do not simply emerge from network-of-networks scenarios; reasons include administrators’ prevailing conception that sufficient optimization capacity remains within their own networks, and that no common ground exists that helps to overcome institutional fragmentation

Mapping institutional change:Analyzing strategies for institutional design in collective infrastructure renewal

Actors' toolset to affect institutional change by doing institutional design is limited because criteria for effective institutional design are often too general and abstract. This paper aims to identify institutional design strategies and explore how they influence institutional change. The theoretical framework builds on Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development framework to map institutional change, and it identifies six institutional design strategies: framing, puzzling, powering, network composition, network outcomes, and network interaction. A comparative case study on Dutch infrastructure renewal opportunities – one case's institutional design interventions attained collective renewal, the other did not – maps institutional change in decision-making rounds through institutional directions. Key findings include that institutional change of position, boundary, choice, and information rules first is conducive to collective action. Moreover, mimicry of especially choice rules is pivotal. Furthermore, institutional design strategies have a configurational nature: microlevel strategies have mesolevel consequences, and some configurations instigate change, whereas others cause dynamic inertia

How rule directions influence actors to achieve collective action:An analysis of Dutch collective infrastructure decision-making

While institutional analyses often assess whether collective action occurs, scant literature exists on key characteristics of institutional rules and how they affect collective action. Building on the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, this paper aims to identify rule directions and demonstrate how rule directions influence collective action. A rule direction is the particular direction that is provided to the decision-making process by the aggregated rules-in-use of a rule type. We compare two Dutch infrastructure projects, where collective decision-making either was or was not achieved. Our study demonstrates that rule directions provide a systematic and context-sensitive explanation for how institutions influence collective action. Collective action requires active agency regarding rule directions–i.e. (re)directing the diversity of positions, soft-closing the exit of boundaries, sharing and assimilating information, establishing process symmetry in aggregation, and managing reciprocity regarding scope–which can transform the institutional predisposition of sectoral action towards collective action.</p