Controlling the Valves: Dealing with Conflict in a Transition Initiative for Public-Private Water Governance in Amsterdam

Over the past decade, municipalities in the Netherlands, as in many other cities worldwide, have often initiated and participated in multi-actor alliances to address their city’s societal and sustainability challenges. While actors’ abilities to identify and engage in potential conflict has been established as a crucial success factor in sustainability transitions, participants’ strategies for enacting such disagreements, especially in collaborative and/or consensus-oriented settings, have thus far been empirically understudied. This chapter focusses one examine one such multi-actor alliance established to explore an urban sustainability transition towards a ‘rainproof’ city: backed by a European subsidy, RESILIO aimed to upscale solutions for smart water retention on green urban roofs, a concept referred to as ‘Blue-Green’ (BG) rooftops. We aim to increase our understanding of how conflict can play a constructive role in the learning process between collaborative participants and be productive in urban sustainability transitions.