Leiding geven in processen van co-evolutie: Over de co-evolutie van beleidsvoorkeuren binnen het Deltaprogramma

Abstract

This PhD-thesis presents the results of a study about leadership that promotes policy preferences of multiple actors with reciprocal interests to be of the same direction. The underlying assumption is that when preferences that consist of concrete measures will have more impact when they aim at realizing the same system state. The development of such policy preferences by different cooperating actors is conceptualized in this study as a process of social co-evolution. The multiple case study described and analyzed in this thesis is the Dutch Delta Program. To unravel the impact of leadership on the social co-evolution of these preferences this studies uses the term synchronization. We have defined synchronization as activities that contribute to developing preferences of the same direction. As a result of our case study we found that enabling leadership is the dominant type of leadership promoting synchronization of policy preferences. This corresponds to our theoretical expectations based on CLT. Based on the results of our case study we recommend further development of both theory and methods to study coevolution, leadership and synchronization concerning program management. We propose a specific conceptualization of administrative and enabling leadership for situations of program management within process systems. Our proposal is to consider administrative and enabling leadership as two ideal types stretching a continuum between maintaining existing boundary judgments (administrative leadership) and administratively applying adjusted boundary judgments that enable adaptations (enabling leadership).