Resilient Partnership

Infrastructure projects in the Netherlands, such as the construction of roads, bridges and tunnels, have become larger and more complex in recent years. Besides the construction itself, more and more factors have come into play, such as environmental aspects and landscape integration, and societal engagement in these projects has also increased. These are often projects with a large societal impact, a long duration and high societal costs, which quickly run into tens or hundreds of millions of euros. For example, the SAA infrastructure program has a total construction time of more than 10 years and a financial volume of around 4.5 billion euros.

This story is about the possibilities in a large infrastructure project and how people from different organizations work together. It is, of course, a story about a remarkable event, one that does not happen every day and on every project, but during smaller scale and less complex operations people are also faced with these kinds of challenges, which they have to solve together.

This thesis is about these kinds of infrastructure projects, about the challenges and tensions that go with them, about how people experience them and how they look jointly for solutions, and how they succeed or sometimes fail. As in the above story, some of the stories in this thesis will be about my own experiences as director of the Schiphol-Amsterdam-Almere infrastructure program (SAA) of Rijkswaterstaat, the largest infrastructure program in the Netherlands at the time of this study.