
Neelke DoornDelft University of Technology | TU · Philosophy Section
Neelke Doorn
PhD MSc MA LLM
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158
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Introduction
Neelke Doorn is distinguished Antoni van Leeuwenhoek professor 'Ethics of Water Engineering' at the Philosophy Department of Delft University of Technology. In 2013, Neelke received a prestigious personal NWO Veni grant for her project 'The Ethics of Flood Risk Management' and in 2019, she received a Vidi grant for her project 'Responsibility arrangements in resilience policy for climate adaptation'. Together with Diane P. Michelfelder, Neelke is Editor-in-Chief of the peer reviewed journal Techne: Research in Philosophy and Technology. Neelke’s primary research is dedicated to water ethics and moral issues in the governance of technological risks.
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
October 2016 - present
Education
September 2007 - May 2011
September 1999 - March 2005
September 1991 - February 2007
Publications
Publications (158)
Despite the topic’s urgency and centrality, this is the first edited volume to offer a comprehensive assessment of the varying approaches to early engagement with new technologies, including nanotechnology, synthetic biology, biotechnology and ICT. Covering five main approaches to early engagement—constructive technology assessment (CTA), value-sen...
Safety is a concern in almost all branches of engineering. Whereas safety was traditionally introduced by applying safety factors or margins to the calculated maximum load, this approach is increasingly replaced with probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) as a tool for dimensioning safety measures. In this paper, the two approaches are compared in ter...
European research funding organizations (RFOs) are increasingly experimenting with public engagement in their funding activities. This case study draws attention to the challenges they face in preparing, implementing, and evaluating ethical public engagement in the context of setting funding priorities, formulating calls for proposals, and evaluati...
Transformative mission-oriented innovation policy aims to redirect innovation, but evidence of this directional ability is limited. This paper examines whether transformer missions redirect values reflected by mission-oriented projects. We study the EU Mission 'Restore our Ocean and Waters' and use probabilistic topic modelling and thematic analyse...
European research funding organizations (RFOs) are increasingly experimenting with public engagement in their funding activities. This case study draws attention to the challenges they face in preparing, implementing, and evaluating ethical public engagement in the context of setting funding priorities, formulating calls for proposals, and evaluati...
Land use change, managed retreat, and relocation programs are examples of exposure reduction measures in flood risk management (FRM). Exposure reduction measures are especially prone to conflict at the local level due to competing interests, values, and attachments. In this paper, we build upon the capability approach to justice and specifically th...
Climate adaptation and resilience scholars are struggling to address distributive and procedural justice in climate resilience efforts. While the capability approach (CA) has been widely appraised as a suitable justice basis for this context, there are few detailed studies assessing this possibility. This paper addresses this gap by advancing discu...
With the increasing reliance on technological advancements, it becomes imperative to critically examine and evaluate their implications on society and the environment. The concepts of acceptance and acceptability have gained prominence among researchers shaping technology implementation strategies. However, the lack of precise definitions for these...
Governance lies at the heart of instigating, steering, and creating the conditions for mission-oriented transitions that potentially help resolve some of our grand societal challenges. In doing so, policymakers will need to navigate both epistemic and normative considerations to develop, implement, and evaluate missions responsibly. A number of sch...
As global issues such as climate change and diminishing resources become increasingly pressing, water recycling has moved into the focus. However, the successful implementation of Direct Potable Water Reuse (DPR) projects hinges on securing public acceptance, which remains challenging. This paper aims to flesh out possible reasons for the lingering...
Coastal megacities all over the world face challenges related to climate adaptation, ecosystem protection andinclusive development. In response, governments develop high-level and long-term climate adaptation plans to guide coastal development. In Metro Manila, a consortium of Dutch and Philippine consultants developed the Manila Bay Sustainable De...
Societal challenges tend to be characterized by their multi-scalarity as problems emerge and co-evolve on multiple scales. Resolving these challenges requires innovators to navigate often conflicting considerations between multiple scales when dealing with complexity, uncertainty, and contestation. Innovators need to ground resolutions in local val...
This framework supports the ethical preparation, implementation, and evaluation of participatory processes in research funding and (applied) research & innovation (R&I). It is intended to help the user understand the context within which they undertake participatory activities and guides them through mapping and addressing ethical challenges and li...
In shaping collective responses to societal challenges, we currently lack an understanding of how to grasp and navigate conflicting ideas on societal problems and potential solutions. The problem-solution space is an increasingly popular framework for conceptualizing the extent to which problem-oriented and solution-oriented views are divergent. Ho...
Responsible Innovation has recently been taken up in public policies and discourses. However, it remains challenging to institutionalise its core dimensions – inclusion, anticipation, responsiveness, reflexivity, and transparency – in practice. De jure standardisation is increasingly seen as an instrument to embed the core principles of Responsible...
This article contributes to recent work on justice in resilience-based projects for climate adaptation. At present, the model commonly used for guiding normative reflection in this domain is the tripartite model of justice, whereby justice is seen as comprising distributive, procedural and recognitional aspects. After discussing some conceptual pro...
Mission-oriented innovation policy is currently gaining renewed interest as an approach for addressing societal challenges. One of the promises is that missions can mobilise and align diverse stakeholders around a shared goal. Recent literature underlines the importance of public participation (e.g. municipalities and civil society organisations) i...
Local governments increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) for automated decision-making. Contestability, making systems responsive to dispute, is a way to ensure they respect human rights to autonomy and dignity. We investigate the design of public urban AI systems for contestability through the example of camera cars: human-driven vehicles e...
Standardisation is increasingly seen as a means to insert ethics in innovation processes. We examine the institutionalisation of responsible innovation in de jure standardisation as this is an important but unexplored research area. In de jure standardisation, stakeholders collaborate in committees to develop standards. We adopt the anticipation, i...
To prevent floods from becoming disasters, social vulnerability must be integrated into flood risk management. We advocate that the welfare of different societal groups should be included by adding recovery capacity, impacts of beyond-design events, and distributional impacts. To prevent floods from becoming disasters, social vulnerability must be...
To adapt to a changing climate, decision-makers design, evaluate, and implement measures that have an implication of justice on citizens in the present and well into the future. Decision-makers are often required to make decisions without certainty of the consequences and understanding their effects on intergenerational justice. Thus, managing the...
The current COVID-19 pandemic has given wastewater research a huge impetus. While wastewater research has some promising applications, there are as yet no well-developed ethical guidelines on how and under what conditions to use wastewater research. The current perspective paper aims to explore the different ethical questions pertaining to wastewat...
Water consumption and freshwater supplies are unevenly shared worldwide, while droughts and floods as extreme climate events are becoming more common. Water challenges cannot be addressed by technical means only. We must reflect on the trade-offs between economic and environmental concerns, and identify which water-related risks to prioritize. Thus...
As the use of AI systems continues to increase, so do concerns over their lack of fairness, legitimacy and accountability. Such harmful automated decision-making can be guarded against by ensuring AI systems are contestable by design: responsive to human intervention throughout the system lifecycle. Contestable AI by design is a small but growing f...
This chapter explores the regulatory aspects and the current needs as discussed in the existing scientific and gray literature. It focuses on the main normative instruments concerning the ethics of innovation at the European level. The chapter considers the current regulatory limitations, the way to embrace ethics and explores participation R&I bey...
This chapter examines ethics and participation as two separate strands with various meanings and institutional responses. It explores both dimensions in an equal manner. The identification of key ethical issues in R&I is inevitably a seriously flawed ambition that cannot embrace all new innovative features and the sectoral specificities that may ar...
This chapter focuses on ways to enable institutionalized participatory practices with tools allowing for an ethical approach to participation and provides conclusions retrieved from a case study combining first‐hand data from European RFOs. The chapter explores interesting considerations on the ethical practices and the features of participatory pr...
Environmental disasters, and especially floods, are among today's biggest sustainability challenges. The number and intensity of floods are increasing, challenging current governance approaches. Governments worldwide are looking to diversify their flood risk management and adaptation strategies, among others, by increasing resident involvement in f...
The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) by public actors has led to a push for more transparency. Previous research has conceptualized AI transparency as knowledge that empowers citizens and experts to make informed choices about the use and governance of AI. Conversely, in this paper, we critically examine if transparency-as-knowledge i...
Scholars increasingly propose distributive justice as a means to foster effective and fair outcomes in climate adaptation. To advance the discussion on its place in climate policy, it is desirable to be able to quantitatively assess the effects of different principles of distribution on the well-being of unequally vulnerable individuals and groups....
Research undertaken in the European project (H2020) "PRO-Ethics". This is a tentative framework to design, implement, and assess participatory practices, in line with ethical considerations.
The goal is to provide guidance for citizen & stakeholder engagement, in Research & Innovation.
This Framework is structured in 3 parts : (i) Theoretical consi...
Technologische Forschung und Entwicklung findet zunehmend innerhalb von Netzwerken statt, in denen unterschiedliche Akteure zusammenarbeiten. Diese Akteure haben unter Umständen unterschiedliche Auffassungen von dem, was ein gutes Leben (s. Kap. 37) ausmacht und welche Rolle Technologien in unserer Gesellschaft dabei spielen. In der Politik geht ma...
This paper provides a retrospective and prospective overview of TU Delft's approach to engineering ethics education. For over twenty years, the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology Section at TU Delft has been at the forefront of engineering ethics education, offering education to a wide range of engineering and design students. The approach develop...
While resilience is a major concept in development, climate adaptation, and related domains, many doubts remain about how to interpret this term, its relationship with closely overlapping terms, or its normativity. One major view is that, while resilience originally was a descriptive concept denoting some adaptive property of ecosystems, subsequent...
Responsible Research and Innovation and Responsible Innovation, as academic endeavours, have grown substantially since their birth in the previous decades. They have been used as synonyms on a structural basis, and both concepts have been studied from various disciplinary backgrounds. This paper identifies Responsible Research and Innovation's and...
It is often assumed that climate adaptation policy asks for new responsibility arrangements between central government and citizens, with citizens getting a more prominent role. This prompts the question under which conditions these new responsibility arrangements can be justified as they may raise serious ethical concerns. Without paying due atten...
The importance of cooperation on transboundary waters is stated as a target in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDG6: water). Cooperation on transboundary water management is critical, particularly because it concerns issues across multiple states, SDGs and targets regarding agriculture, energy, ecosystems, climate...
Recent years have seen a rise of techniques based on artificial intelligence (AI). With that have also come initiatives for guidance on how to develop “responsible AI” aligned with human and ethical values. Compared to sectors like energy, healthcare, or transportation, the use of AI-based techniques in the water domain is relatively modest. This p...
This paper makes a conceptual inquiry into the notion of ‘publics’, and forwards an understanding of this notion that allows more responsible forms of decision-making with regards to technologies that have localized impacts, such as wind parks, hydrogen stations or flood barriers. The outcome of this inquiry is that the acceptability of a decision...
More than any other facet of resilience, social resilience raises the inherent tension within the concept between identity or persistence, and transformation. Is a community the people who make it up, or the geography or physical infrastructure they share? What about the resilience of communities that transform, as a result of a sudden disaster or...
Flood risk management decisions in many countries are based on decision‐support frameworks which rely on cost‐benefit analyses. Such frameworks are seldom informative about the geographical distribution of risk, raising questions on the fairness of the proposed policies. In the present work, we propose a new decision criterion that accounts for the...
In view of the anticipated climate change, many countries face increasing risks of flooding. Since the end of the 20 th century, the traditional hard flood protection measures have been increasingly complemented with spatial flood risk reduction measures. These measures, though in the public interest and as such, benefitting many people, almost ine...
This paper offers critical metaethical groundwork for Normativity Assessment (NA). We present NA as a practice that, faced with a target expression, (i) determines whether it is normative, (ii) characterizes its form of normativity and its role in normative argument, and (iii) clarifies its potential relevance for applied ethics and other fields wh...
In future urban energy systems, smart grid systems will be crucial for the integration of renewable energy. However, their deployment has moral implications, for example regarding data privacy, user autonomy, or distribution of responsibilities. ‘Energy justice’ is one of the most comprehensive frameworks to address these implications, but remains...
Standardization can be achieved in multiple ways; firms may join forces and develop standards in standardization committees, they may compete directly on the market in standards battles, or governmental agencies may impose standards. This paper studies criteria for the selection of standards in a situation in which these three forms of standardizat...
Moral responsibility is one of the core concepts in engineering ethics and consequently in most engineering ethics education. Yet, despite a growing awareness that engineers should be trained to become more sensitive to cultural differences, most engineering ethics education is still based on Western approaches. In this article, we discuss the noti...
Climate change is an urgent problem, requiring ways and approaches to address it. Possible solutions are mitigation, adaptation and deployment of geoengineering. In this article we argue that geoengineering gives rise to ethical challenges of its own. Reflecting on these ethical challenges requires approaches that go beyond conventional, quantitati...
Stakeholder participation is a requirement for environmental decision-making in the European Union. Despite this, numerous instances can be seen in water governance in which stakeholders feel undervalued and unheard, thereby creating unfavourable procedural outcomes, resistance and conflict. In this article, we propose that a process of early-stage...
While consumer and marketing research in developed markets is an established field, research on consumers in an Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) setting is less established and mostly conceptual or qualitative. This paper examines the individual heterogeneity and the local context of BoP consumers with an empirical study on consumption of low cost bottl...
To better understand the impact of deliberations during participatory policymaking events, we introduce and explore the concept of group proximity . An example of such events is citizens’ summits, during which many parallel groups deliberate on solutions for a policy issue. At the summit that was studied, each group followed a value deliberation pr...
The crowd increasingly plays a key role in facilitating innovations in a variety of sectors, spurred on by IT-developments and the concomitant increase in connectivity. Initiatives in this direction, captured under the umbrella-term ‘crowd-based innovations’ (CBI), offer novel opportunities in all domains of society by increasing the access, reach...
Over the past two decades, the attention for resilience has increased dramatically and resilience has become the leading paradigm for considering risks and uncertainty in complex systems. Resilience is now commonly used within a broad range of fields. The concept has not only attracted the attention of academics; decision-makers across disciplines,...
Inaugural address on the acceptance of the chair 'Ethics of Water Engineering' at Delft University of Technology
Published version of inaugural address, delivered on November 16, 2018 (Dutch version)
Many energy cases suffer from social opposition. It is increasingly asserted that paying due attention to the moral values involved in controversial energy cases may increase social acceptance. Value-sensitive design (VSD) has been recommended as a promising approach for addressing moral values in controversial energy cases. This paper aims to empi...
Inaugurele rede ter aanvaarding van de leerstoel 'Ethics of Water Engineering' aan de Technische Universiteit Delft, uitgesproken op 16 november 2018.
Smart grid systems are considered as key enablers in the transition to more sustainable energy systems. However, debates reflect concerns that they affect social and moral values such as privacy and justice. The energy justice framework has been proposed as a lens to evaluate social and moral aspects of changes in energy systems. This paper seeks t...
Over the past two decades, attention for resilience has exploded and resilience has become the leading paradigm for thinking about risks and uncertainty in complex systems. Resilience is now common use within a broad range of fields. The concept has not only attracted the attention of academics; also decision makers across disciplines, sectors, and...
In contemporary engineering, resilience represents a particular approach to safety and risks in engineering and safety management. Whereas the traditional safety paradigm focuses on the prevention of malfunction or accidents-for example, by assessing a system's performance in terms of how often things have gone wrong-the resilience paradigm is focu...
Smart grid technologies are considered an important enabler in the transition to more sustainable energy systems because they support the integration of rising shares of volatile renewable energy sources into electricity networks. To implement them in a large scale, broad acceptance in societies is crucial. However, a growing body of research has r...
This paper aims to explore how insights from the philosophical and social science literature can be incorporated into the definition of resilient infrastructure so that considerations of social justice can be accounted for and addressed more adequately. Building on the view that engineering ultimately aims to promote societal well-being, this paper...
This paper aims to develop a framework for distributing risks. Based on a distinction between risks with reversible losses and risks with irreversible losses, I defend the following composite allocation principle: first, irreversible risks should be allocated on the basis of needs and only after some threshold level has been achieved can the remain...
Legitimacy is widely regarded as a founding principle of ‘good’ and effective governance, yet despite intense academic debate and policy discourse, the concept remains conceptually confusing and poorly articulated in practice. To bridge this gap, this research performed an interpretive thematic analysis of academic scholarship across public adminis...
Bringing value to end consumers is one of the main challenges for businesses in emerging markets. This paper examines the role of information technology (IT) advancements in frugal innovation and in influencing new business models to bring frugal innovations within reach of the poor. A thorough review of theoretical concepts of business models and...
The development of water infrastructure is a long and complex process that involves multiple stakeholders, multiple scales, various sub-systems and relations of dependence among stakeholders. Stakeholder participation is increasingly seen as an indispensable element of water policymaking. The failure to address stakeholders’ underlying values, howe...
Crowd-based innovations: shifting responsibilities in an institutional void
The crowd increasingly plays a key role in facilitating innovations in a variety of sectors, spurred on by IT-developments and the concomitant increase in connectivity. Initiatives in this direction, captured under the umbrella-term ‘crowd-based innovations’, offer novel op...
Decision-making processes involving multiple stakeholders can be rather cumbersome, turbulent and lengthy. The stance of some stakeholders, upholding their individual interests, can slowdown or even block such processes. Recent research suggests that a focus on the values of the stakeholders could benefit those decision-making processes. However, t...