Where We Stand

Abstract

Governments' strategies to address climate change challenges have become increasingly dependent on technocrats and experts' abilities to quantify and codify urban problems and solutions (Savini and Raco, 2019). In the early 2000s, the Municipality of Rotterdam adopted a climate change adaptation approach in its urban development planning and policies. Policies like Water Plan 1 and 2, which emphasized the importance of addressing climate change through adaptive measures, paved the way for more targeted and strategic policies like the Rotterdam Climate Initiative, Rotterdam Program on Sustainability and Climate Change, and Rotterdam Climate Change Adaptation Strategy (Esteban, 2022). Policymakers changed their perspective on flood risk management from working against water to working with water. [...]