Estrategias sociales de prevención y adaptación Social ... - La RED

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The Shadow of the Past in Dutch Flood
Management: The Rediscovery
and Politicisation of “Best Practices”
Jeroen Warner, Wageningen University, Netherlands
Resumen
La gestión holandesa del agua ha llevado un curso errático entre la ambivalencia de “más
diques” y “más espacio” para el río. Mientras que por una parte los diques son considerados
como “tradicionales”, por la otra “más espacio” últimamente significa la reinvención de las
dos prácticas locales establecidas que serían mejores candidatos para competir por la etiqueta
de “tradicional”: construir sobre montículos así como la identificación de tierra ganada al
mar con miras a la inundación controlada. No es el conocimiento local sino la contra-experiencia
estratégica la que se ha organizado para contraponerse a las suposiciones de los iniciadores
del proyecto Espacio para el Río.
Abstract
Dutch water management has steered an uneasy course between “more dikes” and “more
space for the river”. On the one hand, dikes are now regarded as “traditional”. On the other,
“more space” has meant the reinvention of two established local practices that would be
even better candidates for the “traditional” label: building on mounds, and the identification
of calamity polders for controlled flooding. It is not local knowledge but rather strategic
counter-expertise that has been strategically mounted to counter the assumptions of Space
for the River project initiators.
Introduction: Reviving “Traditional” Practices
Nobody in their right mind would have planned the Netherlands where it is today - in inhospitable
marshland, a third of its current territory currently below sea level, about half flood
prone, and the majority of its people and economic assets happen to be in that half.
Perhaps not unrelated to the rise of nationalist, anti-modernist political parties, the
Netherlands has in the past decade seen the revival of an interest in Dutch history. Local
and national governments together set up a programme to restore historic fortresses, hydraulic
artefacts, revived as cultural heritage by the Dutch Agricultural department at national
level. A romantic drive for “renaturation” of rivers such as the Maas explicitly harks
back to a romantic ideal of the “untouched” river, such as the French river Allier today.
Controlled flooding revives a long-standing practice. Recent years have seen a revival of
Holland’s most famous water export, dikes.
These ideas resonate internationally because it was the Dutch who converted the world
to land reclamation: for example, they reclaimed land in East Anglia in the 1630s, helped
Japan control its floods, and after Hurricane Katrina in Summer 2005, the Dutch were first
to be called on, like mercenary water fighters to calculate dikes, Water boards are promoted
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