Greening flood protection (GFP) is increasingly recognized as an adaptive and flexible approach to water management that is well suited to addressing uncertain futures associated with climate change. In the last decade, GFP knowledge and policies have developed rapidly, but implementation has been less successful and has run into numerous barriers. In this paper, we address the challenge of realizing green flood protection goals by specifically considering knowledge in the decision-making of a Dutch flood protection project in Lake Markermeer. In this project, an ecological knowledge arrangement and a traditional flood protection knowledge arrangement are compared and their interactions analysed. The analysis provides insight into the specific difficulties of implementing GFP measures and identifies ways to realize GFP goals. The primary challenge is twofold: First, a self-reinforcing cycle of knowledge production and decision-making in the flood protection domain inhibits the introduction of innovative and multifunctional approaches such as GFP; second, the distribution of power is severely unbalanced in terms of ecological enhancement and flood protection, favouring the latter. Implementation of GFP requires structural change and the integration of ecological and flood protection knowledge and policy. Potentially rewarding routes towards this integration are the exploration of shared interests in GFP and the creation of mutual dependency between knowledge arrangements. The case study and the insights it provides show that GFP is far from mainstream practice and that implementation requires serious effort and courage to break with historical practices.@en

Subsurface Arsenic Removal (SAR) is a technique used for in-situ removal of naturally occurring arsenic in groundwater. This new technology was deployed recently on an experimental basis in two sites in rural Bangladesh, to address the pressing problem of rural drinking water supplies contaminated by arsenic. This article assesses whether and to what extent these first field experiments with SAR can be conceptualized as “socio-technical experiments” designed to incubate and improve radical technological innovations by serving as ‘living lab” “window” and/or “agent of change”. As per writings in transition theory, an experiment functions as a living lab if it permits testing, learning and improving upon a technological innovation. It functions as a window if it is able to facilitate communication and conversation by raising actors’ interest and enrolling new actors. It functions as an agent of change if it can successfully stimulate changes in potential users’ practices and behaviours. Through studying two SAR experiments, this article finds that this novel technology served as a living lab and window, but not (yet) as agent of change, partly because integrating social considerations (such as community buy-in, appropriate site selection and post-installation support) into SAR prototype design during field experimentation proved very difficult. A key obstacle was that the technical efficacy of the technology remained a primary concern during experimentation, and it was unsafe to make water deriving from experimental SAR units available to users. The technology thus remained an abstract idea and provided unable to stimulate behavioural changes amongst users. We conclude that there is a need to identify conditions under which real world experiments can serve as agents of change to facilitate sustainable uptake of arsenic safe technologies in rural developing country contexts.@en