The social challenges facing cities and deltas today are increasingly difficult to solve within existing sectoral boundaries. Climate adaptation, housing construction, energy transition and infrastructure renewal all require space, attention and resources. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly clear that this space, capacity and resources are limited. Scarcity is therefore not a temporary problem, but a structural reality that fundamentally challenges the way we collaborate.

Within Resilient Delta, Lizet Kuitert focuses on precisely this tension. As a university lecturer in Governance & Pluralism at Erasmus University Rotterdam and academic lead at Delta Systems, she focuses on governance issues surrounding integrated working, collaboration and scarcity. Her work is at the intersection of science and practice, where abstract concepts are constantly tested against the stubborn reality of policy and implementation.

A bridge between technology and governance

Lizet’s academic career began at Delft University of Technology, where she was educated and obtained her PhD in a technology-oriented environment. After obtaining her PhD, she moved to Erasmus University Rotterdam for a postdoctoral position and later became a university lecturer at the ESSB, Public Administration and Sociology. That transition meant more than just a change of institution. It confronted her with fundamentally different ways of thinking.

In the technical disciplines, context was central: a design or solution is always embedded in specific spatial, physical and material circumstances. In public administration, she noticed how theories are often applied broadly and generically, regardless of specific situations. That experience forms an important basis for her current work. Lizet consciously moves between these worlds and tries to combine the best of both: an eye for context, without losing the systemic perspective.

Within Resilient Delta, this position offers added value. The programme brings together researchers, policymakers and partners from the field to tackle complex delta challenges. Lizet contributes a governance perspective that is informed by both technical and social insights.

What does integrated working mean?

A central concept in Lizet’s work is integrated working. It is often cited as the answer to complex social challenges, but in practice it often remains abstract. According to Lizet, integrated working is essentially about transcending boundaries: not only between sectors, but also between professions and decision-making levels.
Instead of approaching a challenge from a single dominant perspective – for example, mobility, housing or water – integral working requires bringing together different perspectives. This also means that responsibility does not automatically lie with a single department or actor, but is shared. This is precisely what makes integral working complicated.

In the public domain, organisations have historically been structured along sectoral lines. Departments have their own tasks, budgets and accountability structures. This structure provides clarity, but is at odds with tasks that require coherence. Integrated working therefore requires not only cooperation, but also different forms of organisation, management and accountability.

Integrated working therefore also touches on the question of how new approaches are embedded in existing organisations and decision-making processes: who implements them, who is responsible and how do they become part of daily routines?

Conflicting values and new tensions

When parties from different sectors work together, they bring with them divergent values and rationales. These tensions are exacerbated by the fact that the parties involved often do not speak the same language: technical, administrative and social actors use different concepts, assumptions and ways of reasoning. Public, private and social interests do not automatically run parallel, especially under pressure of scarcity. In her research, Lizet saw this reflected, for example, in an area development project in which sport was one of the interests within a broader spatial challenge. By following this sports case, it became clear how working in an integrated manner in practice creates both opportunities and tensions. Not because interests are necessarily incompatible, but because uncertainty arises about roles, responsibilities and decision-making.

The research showed that explicitly defining these new boundaries is an important condition for keeping collaboration workable. When professionals have clarity about their role in a collaboration, there is room to connect perspectives without putting pressure on trust.

Scarcity as a structural issue

Scarcity is a recurring theme in Lizet’s work. She approaches scarcity not only as a shortage of resources, but also as a consequence of the way systems and processes are organised. Space is scarce in the Netherlands, but manpower, financial resources and institutional capacity are also under pressure. Major transitions reinforce this pressure, as innovation and maintenance often take place simultaneously.

Integrality is often seen as a way of dealing with scarcity, for example by pooling resources or seeking multifunctional solutions. At the same time, working integrally can also cause additional strain, putting pressure on staff and funding. It can also lead to new tensions when it conflicts with existing sectoral logics.

Why this expert meeting?

The expert meeting “Meer met Minder” stems from these insights and from discussions with colleagues and partners in the field. Lizet noticed that many professionals struggle with similar questions, but rarely meet each other. Bringing these experiences together creates space for learning, recognition and the development of new connections between sectors that are highly interdependent in practice. The aim of the event is not to present ready-made solutions, but to create space for exchange and learning. By comparing experiences, patterns can become visible and participants can learn from each other. Recognition plays an important role in this: the realisation that problems are not individual, but structural and shared.

What does she hope it will achieve?

Lizet hopes that the expert meeting will provide participants with insight, recognition and new connections. Insight into how others deal with similar dilemmas, recognition of shared frustrations. She also hopes that the event will contribute to building a community of professionals and researchers who can find each other around the theme of scarcity, even beyond this meeting.

For Resilient Delta, the event fits within a broader ambition to build sustainable networks around complex challenges. It is a way to connect science and practice and to explore how new forms of collaboration can be supported.

Ultimately, Lizet is committed to developing ways of dealing with scarcity that do justice to different values and perspectives. This requires reflection, interaction, and a willingness to organise differently. The expert meeting is the next step in this process.