| dc.description.abstract | This thesis was inspired by the Interreg North Sea Region project called FAIR, which commenced in 2015 and is due to be completed in 2020. The main goal of the project is to optimize the lifecycle of the primary flood defenses across all the North Sea Region (NSR) countries by shifting from a traditional, reactive asset management strategy to an adaptive, proactive asset management strategy. There is a paradigm shift taking place from simply flood mitigation and prevention to flood adaptation, one embracing uncertainty and change. In this thesis the adoption of this new paradigm is investigated by examining the field of asset management for primary flood defenses. After a synthesis of relevant literature, a proactive asset management framework has been derived. It is about thinking ahead by incorporating long-term planning into short-term strategies and identifying as many measures for primary flood defenses as possible in order to increase the likelihood of selecting the most optimum one. It is also about adopting a whole-systems approach and looking at the network of assets and not only at individual primary flood defenses such as a dike. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the governance barriers that asset owners in each of the seven North Sea Region country faces to proactive asset management implementation for primary flood defenses in the North Sea Region. The central research question that it sought to answer is: What are the governance barriers that asset owners in the North Sea Region face to proactive asset management implementation for primary flood defenses and what are practical opportunities to overcome them. This question was answered with the help of a governance barriers analytical framework which was derived from the literature on governance and also asset management, by selecting five categories of governance barriers that could possibly encompass a large variety of specific barriers. The analysis produced some insightful results for both theory and practice. First of all, asset owners in each North Sea Region country consider different barriers to be significant, and these differences could in part be explained by the national contexts and current asset management strategies. Countries could be compared in terms of the stages in which the identified governance barriers were presumed to occur by the asset owners and the researcher, the significance accorded to the barriers and the frequency (number of countries that identified a specific type of barrier). | |
