Contentious governance around climate change measures in the Netherlands

Abstract

Conflicts over mitigation measures involve processes of contentious governance in which governmental and non-governmental players contest policies proposed or implemented by other governmental players or their business partners. Comparing a case of carbon capture and storage (CCS) with that of a nearshore windfarm in the Netherlands, I ask: how did local governmental players and their non-governmental allies succeed in getting the CCS project in Barendrecht taken off the table, while unable to block plans for the nearshore windfarm off the coast of Katwijk, Noordwijk and Zandvoort? Focusing on persuasion, I find that rhetorical framing based on expertise and ‘not in my backyard’ (NIMBY) escapist framing did not make much difference in either case. In the CCS case, a process of scaling up procedural critique to the national level led to repeal of the plan. A similar process did not happen in the windfarm case.