Join us for a seminar with Maximiliaan Menten, research assistant with the University of Amsterdam.

History of Dutch Water Management: Lessons for Societal Challenges

Water management in the Netherlands knows a long-standing tradition of dealing with the environment, which dates back as far as 500 BC, when people in Friesland built terpen and wierden to protect themselves against water surges. Through time water management in the Netherlands became more structured and mainly involved building and regulating safeguards against the water through dikes, river embankments, and the creation of polders by draining lakes and fenland. This so called Dutch amphibious society can be seen as a long-standing collective tradition of protecting the land against a constant threat from water, and therefore has plenty of examples that can be analysed to provide new perspectives and insights on social entrepreneurship and (corporate) social responsibility.

Maximiliaan will introduce his research on Dutch water management where he explores the link between stakeholder theory and participation and representation within seventeenth century Dutch water management. He will discuss how cooperation in Dutch water boards can be explained, by identifying the different stakeholders and stakeholder relationships through the example of a sea dike in the polder Bunschoten and the Lek River dike between Amerongen and Vreeswijk. By looking at the different stakeholders involved, the question can be asked about the relevant resources of those stakeholders to see if differences in these could help explain differences between the cases examined. By discussing the historiography on participation and representation in Dutch water-boards in the pre-democratic era through the lens of stakeholder theory he hopes to provide a new angle, for current historiography, that can potentially give additional insights on how water boards were managed, as well as contribute to a surging interest in management literature in the research of societal challenges, such as from the perspective of social entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility.

This seminar is online. If you would like to attend, please send an e-mail to collective-action@rsm.nl and you will receive a Teams-invite shortly.