Q: The BlueGreen Governance project has now held two workshops with stakeholders in the Scheldt region. How did that go?

Cory: It’s been a bit of a mixed experience, to be honest. The one-on-one conversations or semi-structured interviews I’ve had with stakeholders have been an enriching experience. The genuine enthusiasm of the participants — with many willing to talk to me at length about their work — has provided invaluable material for our research. Yet the workshop attendance remains lower than the other case studies. I think this reflects the reality of our case study region where many stakeholders are already involved in many other projects and possibly experiencing stakeholder fatigue. But the fact that stakeholders will nonetheless readily spend considerable time explaining their work in one-to-one interviews suggests that the discussion forum is an important consideration when choosing how to engage our stakeholders. It suggests there is a preference for more personalised relationship building and perhaps this is how we best overcome stakeholder fatigue in our case study region.

Mark: On the Dutch side, it was somewhat similar. We had perhaps four or five participants from the Netherlands. Part of the explanation is that the relevant parties — water authorities, ecologists, the Flemish-Dutch Scheldt Commission — are already in regular contact with each other. So our workshops feel like something that comes on top of what they’re already doing, rather than filling a genuine gap. They are willing to share information and talk to us, but they don’t feel this project is urgently necessary for them, because they’re already so interconnected.

Q: The Flemish-Dutch Scheldt Commission plays an important coordinating role. But does it cover the full range of issues your project addresses?

Mark: Not entirely. The commission is primarily focused on dredging and the accessibility of the Port of Antwerp. Long-term questions about climate adaptation, nature restoration, and how those two agendas connect — those are somewhat secondary topics there. And that’s actually where our project could add value: linking the long-term planning of flood risk management with the long-term planning of nature conservation. I’m not sure those two planning exercises have really been put side by side and examined together. That is something we could genuinely contribute.

Q: Is there a shared long-term vision for the estuary, or do the Dutch and Flemish sides approach it differently?

Cory: In Flanders, there has been significant institutional transformation since 2005 with what’s called the updated Sigma Plan. This was the moment when nature restoration was formally integrated into flood risk management along the Sea Scheldt. Looking forward, the Sigma Plan’s timeline runs to 2030, and there are now efforts to design a third version. The climate challenges are clear — sea level rise, more intense rainfall events, preparing for waterbombs like the 2021 flooding disaster in Wallonia — but there are genuine question marks over whether the next plan will maintain, or even deepen, its commitment to nature restoration. The political context has shifted and budgets are uncertain.

Mark: In the Netherlands, the Delta Programme provides a strong long-term framework for flood risk management, with institutional backing and dedicated funding. But nature-based solutions — especially along the Western Scheldt — face greater resistance. The Zeeland region has a deeply rooted culture of controlling water, shaped by the trauma of the 1953 North Sea flood. Giving land back to the river or the sea, which is what depoldering requires, clashes directly with that identity. It’s not just a technical or financial barrier — it’s a cultural one.

Q: Is the science being heard? There seems to be strong ecological evidence for more integrated approaches.

Cory: It’s a complicated picture. The people working within the Flemish Waterways Agency and the Agency for Nature and Forest seem personally aligned with what the science is saying. They understand that nature restoration and flood safety can reinforce each other. But when they bring plans to the ministry, they hit blockades — scarce ‘room for the river’ and conflicting interests on land, inclining budgets and so on. And there’s a fundamental mismatch between the long timelines that climate adaptation requires and the four- or five-year cycles of electoral politics. Every time a project goes back to the ministry for authorisation, it finds a completely different set of ministers. That’s extremely disruptive.

Mark: On the Dutch side, the ecologists and nature conservation organisations are clearly pushing for more room for natural dynamics in the estuary — more sedimentation, more flexible management of dikes and floodplains. But the water managers don’t necessarily see this as their urgency. The Western Scheldt is a very wide estuary, and a depoldering intervention at one point simply doesn’t have the same measurable effect on water levels as it would in a river valley. So the flood safety argument for nature-based solutions is harder to make here, which weakens the political case.

Q: How did Flanders manage to move further towards integrated approaches than the Netherlands? Was there a turning point?

Cory: There was, actually — and it’s a lovely story. In the mid-1990s, a group of ecologists realised that the water managers they were working with had never actually been to the river. Never visited it in person. To ecologists, whose whole work is in the field, this was incomprehensible. So they organised a boat trip. They took the water managers out onto the Scheldt and showed them, physically, what was happening to the estuary — the erosion, the loss of mudflats, the ecological degradation. That was a pivotal moment of building trust between two technical communities that had been working in parallel without really connecting. From there, it was a gradual process of publishing accessible articles, presenting alternative scenarios, and showing that hydraulic engineering could be done in a nature-restorative way.

Q: What can the project realistically achieve? Is institutional change possible in this context?

Mark: I’m cautiously optimistic about what we can contribute. Rather than pushing hard for specific interventions that are politically blocked, the more useful thing we can do is put the long-term plans on the table side by side — the flood risk management plan and the nature conservation plan — and ask: what happens if we just follow these two tracks independently? Where do they block each other, and where could they actually support each other? I think there’s real value in using something like adaptive pathways — a kind of “metro map” of possible futures — to make those synergies and conflicts visible.

Cory: On the Flemish side, I think we need to tread more carefully. The preparation of the third Sigma Plan is highly politically sensitive right now. Our stakeholders need to trust that we won’t disrupt the ongoing process.  So the communication strategy there is quite different — more a matter of carefully coaxing people to be open about what they’re working on, so we can do meaningful analysis. It’s a very different style from the Dutch approach of putting everything on the table at once.

Mark: That’s true. And I do think the Dutch approach has its merits — transparency, honesty about the dilemmas. Start from the real tension: we value nature conservation, we’re legally bound by the Birds and Habitats Directive, and we also have to manage flood risk. Don’t hide those contradictions. These are all intelligent people; they can work with complexity. At least, that’s my hope.