Amsterdam has committed to ambitious climate targets and is looking for ways to innovate its energy infrastructure. To support these ambitions, the municipality of Amsterdam participates in European pilot projects that test new technologies and new forms of collaboration. These p
...
Amsterdam has committed to ambitious climate targets and is looking for ways to innovate its energy infrastructure. To support these ambitions, the municipality of Amsterdam participates in European pilot projects that test new technologies and new forms of collaboration. These pilots create opportunities for innovation, yet they also expose governance challenges and raise questions about how lessons from these project can be integrated in the municipality.
Municipalities are expected to take an important role in pilot projects, connecting experimental initiatives to long-term strategies and public responsibilities. This role is demanding, as municipalities are large organisations with many tasks and internal layers. Coordinating across departments while working with external partners makes pilots an important but also challenging instrument. Research often describes how collaboration between public, private, civic and academic actors takes shape. Less is known about how the public actor navigates these collaborations and how their position influences the way pilots function.
This thesis explores that through the Horizon 2020 project ATELIER in Amsterdam, which develops Positive Energy Districts in collaboration between public, private, academic and civic actors. The study investigates how coordination was organised and how the municipality engaged with and recognised the knowledge produced during the project.
The research is based on a qualitative single-case study design. It combines three sources of data: project documents, semi-structured interviews with municipal officials and consortium partners, and observations during an internship at the Municipality of Amsterdam. This combination made it possible to do a qualitative analysis of how coordination and learning were experienced in practice. The analysis draws on 2 main theories. The first is the collaboration dynamics from the Collaborative Governance Regime framework from Emerson et al. (2012), which looks at how collaboration is sustained through engagement, trust and joint capacity, and the second is absorptive capacity’s first step on how organisations recognise and take up external knowledge. Together, these concepts were used to examine both the organisation of coordination and the conditions for municipal learning.
The results show that Amsterdam’s role in ATELIER lacked clear institutional anchoring. Responsibilities were unclear, leadership improvised, and coordination often relied on informal arrangements and motivated individuals. Engagement was inconsistent, staff turnover disrupted continuity, and mechanisms for transferring knowledge across departments were absent. As a result, lessons on collaboration and governance risk staying within the consortium and can’t easily reach the performances of municipality of Amsterdam.
The thesis concludes that municipal readiness is a decisive condition for effective participation in pilots. Clear purpose, defined responsibilities, and internal structures are necessary for municipalities to translate pilot lessons into practice. The study exposes the fragility of pilot scalability and provides a checklist of organisational conditions that can strengthen the role of public actors in future collaborative projects. The theoretical contribution is that, while current frameworks mainly emphasise relational factors of collaboration, this research shows the need to also account for the readiness of public actors.