🌊 Governance of water quality has a long history …

Tilburg Law School has decided to award funding to the project ‘Governing the Commons in the Rhine Delta’! Together with Merlijn van Hulst, Marco in ‘t Veld will be leading this project on how early modern cities in the Rhine Delta governed clean water as a shared resource and what their innovative civic practices can teach us about community-based environmental governance today.

From 16th-century bans on dye discharge in Dordrecht to neighbourhoods in Nijmegen organised around freshwater wells, urban communities have long played a crucial role in protecting water quality. By investigating these civic initiatives through archival research, the project aims to uncover forms of popular participation that flourished long before modern democratic institutions took shape.

🔍 Our project asks what these historical practices can teach us today:
• 🏙️ How did early modern cities understand and address water quality?
• 👥 How were citizens involved?
• 📚 How might these forms of participation refine current thinking on collective action and public governance?

By bringing archival research into conversation with contemporary governance theory, Merlijn and I hope to uncover practical insights from a period when cities relied on local initiative, creativity, and bottom-up problem-solving.

🙌 Grateful for the support of Jonathan Verschuuren and Kirsty Holstead in this project.

🌍 I’m excited to dive into this interdisciplinary journey connecting the past and the present to better understand how we can collectively govern the commons.

📢 A vacancy for a #PhD candidate will follow shortly … Stay tuned!

Please find more information on the project page here on our website!

dr. Marco in ‘t Veld

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