NETLIPSE Chairman Hans Ruijter (Rijkswaterstaat, The Netherlands) has completed his PhD-research on ‘Resilient Partnership’ last week, on Wednesday the 27th of March. We would like to congratulate Hans with this great achievement!
During the Oslo Network Meeting in November 2018 Hans already shared the preliminary results of his research with us (see: Network Meeting Oslo). Below you can find a short summary of his doctoral thesis and a link to his dissertation.
A short summary
Within large infrastructure projects the cooperation between partners often goes wrong and results in delays and cost overruns. The largest infrastructure project in the Netherlands at the moment is the Schiphol-Amsterdam-Almere (SAA) road programme. Hans Ruijter investigated the collaboration between public and private parties within SAA, with the focus on how mutual trust and adaptive ability can be built into a cooperative relationship.
Often there is a gray area in these types of collaborations, because not every topic is completely covered in large contracts. Hans investigated the area of tension that exists between the client and the contractor: about the dilemmas that arise, what considerations and choices have been made and what the consequences of these choices have been for trust and adaptive ability in the relationship.
A central role in Hans’ research is for stories (narratives) in the workplace and the changes that arise in these stories over time. He investigated both sides and the conflicting sounds that come from them. It is thanks to this multiple perspective that Hans gives a picture of and significance to cooperation within a large infrastructure programme such as SAA.
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