ArgumentIn the Netherlands, a country of water, dikes, and dams, the role of civil engineering in policy making and public debates over flood safety have changed over the last four decades. This had not just implied that new directions in flood safety policy were considered by politics, but also that engineering experts traditionally working in this area found their credibility challenged by competing expertises. I will argue that in responding to those challenges, experts combined boundary work with identity work, in (...) which the planning of actions and learning from experience are informed by the identity of oneself as an expert. The views of experts on the boundary zone of science, policy, and public debate, and the role and skills one attributes to oneself, are regarded as important aspects of that identity work. On the basis of biographical-narrative research, this will show that although the four experts studied here belong to a specific generation of engineers, experiencing common challenges and developments in their field of work, the combination of identity work and boundary work results in specific roles and responses for each individual expert. (shrink)

In the 1990s, Dutch nature policy adopted a new policy concept, ‘nature development', whereas, until then, ‘nature preservation’ had largely dominated both the discourses and practices of nature policy-making. Nature development can be regarded as the Dutch counterpart of concepts such as ecological restoration, emerging simultaneously in other national nature policies. This paper argues that the rise of the nature development concept in the Netherlands is mainly due to the entrepreneurial strategies of a relatively small group of individuals. To study (...) the impact of the latter's entrepreneurial strategies on the adoption and implementation of the new concept, we first made a content analysis of nature-policy documents issued between 1977, when the concept of nature development was coined for the first time, and 2012. Next, we analysed newspaper articles covering the debate on Dutch nature policy. Third, we conducted semi-structured interviews with the key individuals involved. This article deliberately takes an agency perspective, emphasising the complementary roles that policy entrepreneurs played in the different phases of the policy change process, with concept developers, early adopters and translators, and early implementers. Their success is to be attributed to a smart combination of discursive and network strategies. (shrink)