Exporting resilience : evaluating US-Netherlands collaborations aimed at enhancing flooding resilience in New York City and New Orleans

Abstract

Since Hurricane Katrina, partnerships have developed between the Netherlands and various governmental bodies in the United States with the express goal of helping cities enhance their resilience to serious flooding. At the core of these partnerships is the belief that governmental and non-governmental institutions in the Netherlands have developed technical and conceptual expertise that could benefit cities in the U.S. An unspoken goal of these partnerships has also been to help Dutch engineering, design, and dredging firms compete for contracts offered in the United States under the banner of enhancing resilience. Through interviews with nineteen senior Dutch and American officials involved with these partnerships, the author tests collaborations between the Dutch and the cities of New York and New Orleans against the policy transfer frameworks of Dolowitz and Marsh (1996 and 2000) and Matsuura (2006), and then discusses alternative frameworks through which these collaborations can be considered. In New Orleans, policy transfer frameworks succeed in modeling the dynamics of the relationship, while in New York they do not. In both cases, however, alternative frameworks of policy mobility and knowledge networks may be more appropriate to model the dynamics at play.