Project properties
Title Making sense of Climate Change Adaptation Politics
Group Public Administration and Policy
Project type thesis
Credits 33-39
Supervisor(s) Dr. Art Dewulf, Martijn Vink (both PAP, public administration and policy)
Dr. Erik van Slobbe (ESS)
Examiner(s) Dr. Art Dewulf, Dr. Erik van Slobbe
Contact info Martinus.vink@wur.nl or art.dewulf@wur.nl
Begin date 2014/04/01
End date
Description One of the key characteristics of a parliamentary democracy is the constant dialogue between the ministers in power (the Cabinet) and the Parliament and Senate. Parliament and Senate question the Cabinet through ‘parliamentary’ questions and the Cabinet answers via the responsible minister. In this political play the meaning issues get by how politicians frame them often appears to be crucial for political parties to either go along with the Cabinet or to explicitly oppose policy initiatives and lobby for oppositional support at other political parties. When it comes to climate change adaptation policies, the last decade the Dutch government introduced several policy initiatives. One of the first policy initiatives (Inter-ministerial programme Adaptation Space and Climate) was the result of a member of the Senate (Lemstra) questioning the Cabinet on the lack of policies targeting climate change impacts. After that, several large climate change adaptation policy initiatives where launched by the Cabinet, of which the largest include the Delta Committee and its successor the Delta Programme. When the issue of climate change became seriously questioned by media, known as “climate gate” and “the IPCC errors”, the debate in Parliament and Senate seem to have changed. Some political parties openly deny the existence of a changing climate. Therefore the framing of the climate issues, like ‘climate change is a left wing hobby’, or ‘sea-level rise will threaten us again’, seem to play a serious role in how climate adaptation policies politically get meaning and whether they will be implemented or not.

Research objective:
In this MSc thesis project the student is asked to study the framing of parliamentary questions and answers for several climate adaptation polices over the last ten years, and draw conclusions on how the use of language determined the legitimacy and success of certain climate adaptation policies in politics, and resulted in failures for others.
Used skills An interest for politics, foreknowledge in public policy is preferable
Requirements This thesis is jointly supervised by ESS and PAP