Water en bodem sturend : learning from international cases

The water and soil system is a natural supplier of clean drinking water, and the basis for fertile agricultural land and nature areas. In 2022, a Parliamentary Letter on water and soil based planning was published in the Netherlands (Ministry IenW, 2022). It focused on the need to base spatial planning and design on the water and soil system and to protect and restore this system as much as possible (in Dutch: Water en Bodem Sturend, WBS). The new Dutch government (2024) later impaired the ‘water and soil based planning’ policy by replacing it with “taking water and soil into account” (Ministry IenW, 2024; In Dutch: rekening houden met water en bodem), but the principles and structural choices in the Letter still stand. Projects have been initiated at different levels of national and regional governments using these principles as a basis. To support and overcome some of the hurdles encountered when implementing WBS, international experiences in other countries were looked for to be used as a source of inspiration for the stakeholders in the Netherlands. In this study, a longlist of potential cases was prepared from which four cases were selected for further analysis: 1) Cali, Colombia 2) Flanders, Belgium 3) Portland, USA and 4) Tyrol, Austria. The selection was based on scoring across various criteria such as alignment to WBS principles, relevance to the Netherlands and the implementation of legal, spatial and financial instruments.