Ecodynamic design as a boundary object

Abstract

Consensus in Dutch society is that the existing coastal defence regime is not sustainable. Adaptation is not only a technical challenge, but affects elements like ecology, cultural heritage, recreation, urban development, making the issue complex both from a political and from a scientific point of view. And innovations must cope with the actual system of human beliefs, values and knowledges which constitute the old coastal management regime. One possible new regime is ecodynamic design. This is an approach using interactions between ecological processes and human interventions to create new coastal structures. The Building with Nature innovation program is implementing ecodynamic experiments along the Dutch coast. One of these is an experiment along the Frisian IJsselmeer coast in the Netherlands. Participating actors (governments, NGO’s, private partners) frame it as an adaptive action, potentially providing new flood defence methods to the region. The aim of this paper is to explore the role this Building with Nature experiment plays in the interactions between actors with different perspectives and how the experiment influences collaborative learning. This case is analysed using the concept of boundary objects