Udo Pesch

Delft University of Technology | TU

The proposed solutions for sustainable development generally require new links and the involvement of multiple sectors. As a consequence, organizations can rely less on closed and rational analysis-based forms of strategizing; they increasingly see the need for joint strategy processes. However, a joint strategy process challenges the boundaries of...

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...

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...

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...

Energy justice is often approached through the four tenets of procedural, distributive, restorative and recognition justice. Though these tenets are important placeholders for addressing what type of justice issues are involved, they require further normative substantiations. These are achieved by using principles of justice to specify why-normativ...

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...

Experts in the Netherlands have lately debated the novel policy idea to freely apply municipal solid waste incineration bottom ash (MSWIBA). In this paper, we map this ambivalent and unforeseeable, subjective, expert debate. This will help policymaking because more knowledge on subjective expert viewpoints and perceptions allows for clustering conf...

Smart cities are proposed as a solution for problems of urbanization. Technologies associated with smart cities involve the monitoring of human activities and resulting data streams. These technologies affect certain public values, which may be subject to change depending on their sociotechnical development. This paper presents a method that enable...

In this paper, we take inspiration from original institutional economics (OIE) as an approach to study value change within the highly complex assembly of sociotechnical transformations that make up the energy transition. OIE is examined here as a suitable perspective, as it combines Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy and a methodological interactionist...

In this chapter, the COVID-19 crisis is examined as an episode that reveals various complications in the relation between values and institutions. I argue that these complications cannot be addressed satisfactorily by ethics, as this field is characterised by a gap between the identification of values worth pursuing and the effectuation of these va...

In 2018, the European Union laid the foundation for a large-scale energy transition: away from fossil-based energy and towards renewable, sustainable energy solutions. A transition of such a large scale comes with challenges. To cope with the ills that an energy transition brings the European Commission proposed the Just Transition Fund in 2021. It...

The need to adapt to climate change brings about moral concerns that according to ‘eco-centric’ critiques cannot be resolved by modernist ethics, as this takes humans as the only beings capable of intentionality and rationality. However, if intentionality and rationality are reconsidered as ‘counterfactual hypotheses’ it becomes possible to align m...

In this article, we posit designerly thinking as a family of design approaches that some believe are able to effectively respond to wicked problems. We will scrutinize this premise by revisiting Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber’s 1973 article in which the notion of wicked problems was originally introduced. In it, Rittel and Webber note the emergence...

The North Sea Consultation was set up to resolve conflicting claims for space in the North Sea. In 2020, this consultation process resulted in the North Sea Agreement, which was supported by the Dutch Parliament and cabinet as a long-term policy; however, the fishing sector felt excluded, left the consultation process, and does not support the agre...

It is hard to know what society wants when it comes to the development and implementation of Renewable Energy Technology (RET), as society articulates its assessment in many different ways. This chapter presents social conflict on RET as one of these forms of societal assessment. After we conceptualise the notion of societal assessment as a rhizoma...

The objective of this study is to identify factors that influence actual electric vehicle (EV) drivers’ acceptance of Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) charging. The study takes a qualitative approach in order to provide insight into actual EV users’ perceptions of V2G technology and their underlying motivation to accept or not accept V2G. The Theory of Planne...

In Energy Social Science (ESS), the concept of imagined publics is used to describe how energy actors perceive societal groups around new energy technologies and projects. Findings indicate that imagined publics often build upon deficit assumptions; people are (unjustly) considered unknowledgeable, incapable, unwilling and irresponsible agents in g...

New technologies will have a big impact on our public life-world, suggesting that it is necessary to have a public debate on innovation. Such a debate is missing: instead of having a debate on the process of technology development, only expected effects of new technologies are discussed. This is undesirable as innovation processes recruit implicit...

This paper examines the intrinsic relation between institutions and social justice. Its starting point is that processes of institutionalization invoke societal groups to articulate justice demands which, in their turn, give rise to processes of institutional redesign. In liberal democracies, demands for justice are articulated as a pursuit for ema...

MSocial Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) uses a life cycle perspective to assess social impacts of products, and the S-LCA guidelines describe developing the system boundaries based on a factory-level perspective. However, such a perspective may exclude stakeholders with a negative social performance which are cooperating with a factory but are not di...

This paper describes how particular normative dimensions have become embedded in public space. It identifies four periods of urban history, starting with that of the liberal city which introduces a heterogeneous set of liberal and democratic values. The sanitary city of the nineteenth century came to depict public space as a system of flows that ne...

Energy controversies have been widely studied. Such studies are, however, generally based on either single case studies, providing rich and in-depth understanding of (local) dynamics of planning and implementation processes, or they focus on understanding responses to a specific technology (not bound to a location). Therefore these studies tend to...

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...

Rittel and Webber connected their notion of “wicked problems” to three fundamental planning dilemmas. Many approaches within public administration theory have explicitly addressed wicked problems yet hardly paid attention to the dilemmas. We revisit the planning dilemmas to find out their potential relevance for current administration theory and pr...

The self is conceptualized in a multitude of ways in different scholarly fields; at the same time moral agency appears to presuppose a unitary conception of the self. This paper explores this tension by introducing ‘moral senses’ which inform the normative evaluations of a person. The moral senses are featured as innate dispositions, but they inevi...

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) has emerged as a policy concept over the past five years as a notion that explicitly aims to emphasize social and ethical issues of research and innovation. Based on a structured literature review, we assess how scholars deal with the concept of RRI in relation to notions of sustainability and sustainable d...

In order to have the assessment of the local impacts of energy projects, decision-makers need to separate a local public from the wider public. From the starting point that 'publics' are so-called imaginaries, this perspective paper argues that the operationalisation of publics tends to impose concerns, motivations and capacities upon the members o...

New network technologies are framed as eliminating ‘transaction costs’, a notion first developed in economic theory that now drives the design of market systems. However, the actual promise of the elimination of transaction costs seems unfeasible, because of a cyclical pattern in which network technologies that make that promise create processes of...

This paper presents a multi‐criteria decision‐making approach for the selection of a sustainable product‐package design, accounting for the different actors within a food supply chain. The study extends the focus of sustainable packaging design to the collective of all supply chain actors. Decision criteria are identified via a literature review, a...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce three storylines that address the relation between economic growth, technical innovation and environmental impact. The paper assesses if and how these storylines as guiding visions increase our range of future orientations. Design/methodology/approach The paper first explains its general outline an...

Local sustainability initiatives are studied from two scholarly perspectives: the perspective of sociotechnical innovation, which relates to the capacity of bottom-up initiatives to contribute to the development of sociotechnical alternatives; and the perspective of civic engagement which relates to the capacity of citizens to organize themselves i...

Societal controversies on the implementation of new energy technologies relate to public values that are affected by these new technologies. The process of specifying and articulating these values and assessing technologies based on those values follows both a formal and an informal trajectory. This chapter studies the interplay between such formal...

In this paper we develop a framework for understanding how justice-related claims play a role in the dynamics of controversy in energy projects. We do so by distinguishing two interacting trajectories of assessment: a formal trajectory that is embedded in the legal system and an informal trajectory that is mainly embedded in public discourse. The e...

In many sustainable urban innovation projects, the efforts, endurance and enthusiasm of individuals at key positions are considered a crucial factor for success. This article studies the role of individual agency in sociotechnical niches by using Kingdon’s agenda-setting model. Although strategic niche management is commonly used to study processes...

Nooit eerder leefden er zo veel mensen op deze planeet en van al die mensen woonden er nog nooit zo veel in steden. De vraag is hoe deze steden leefbaar kunnen blijven, als ze onderdeel worden van een eenvormig geglobaliseerd economisch systeem, als niemand elkaar meer kent, als we meer afval produceren dan we aankunnen? Hoe zorgen we er voor dat w...

Nooit eerder leefden er zo veel mensen op deze planeet en van al die mensen woonden er nog nooit zo veel in steden. De vraag is hoe deze steden leefbaar kunnen blijven, als ze onderdeel worden van een eenvormig geglobaliseerd economisch systeem, als niemand elkaar meer kent, als we meer afval produceren dan we aankunnen? Hoe zorgen we er voor dat w...

Glamurs report on case studies in The Netherlands: Repair Cafe and Vogelwijk Energiek

Few people disagree on the need for sustainable development, but ideas about what it exactly means and how to pursue it diverge considerably. Although such normative conflicts are key to sustainability transitions, attention to such conflicts is lacking in transition studies. In this paper we understand societal conflict as an informal assessment o...

• A participatory backcasting methodology has been developed for the GLAMURS project, entitled participatory backcasting for sustainable lifestyles and a green economy. It consists of two stakeholder workshops; a first workshop for problem exploration and development of visions for sustainable lifestyle and a green economy followed by a second work...

This paper is an abridged version of my Dutch manuscript 'Het leven in de vrije stad'. The book describes the challenges of urbanization which are how to be tolerant to strangers and how to deal effectively with waste. The book argues that a strong public space is necessary to have peaceful interaction of people, and to have an innovative climate t...

Proefschrift Universiteit Leiden. Met index, lit. opg. - Met samenvatting in het Nederlands. Available on: http://www.amazon.com/Predicaments-Publicness-Conceptual-Ambiguity-Administration/dp/9059720822/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1431504516&sr=1-1&keywords=udo+pesch

We analyse the dynamics of a decision-making process on a contested carbon capture and storage project in The Netherlands by investigating the interactions between the involved stakeholders and how these reinforced, or were shaped by, a meta-frame. Our analysis suggests that from the start of the project, the interactions between stakeholders were...

The introduction of new energy technologies may lead to public resistance and contestation. It is often argued that this phenomenon is caused by an inadequate inclusion of relevant public values in the design of technology. In this paper we examine the applicability of the value sensitive design (VSD) approach. While VSD was primarily introduced fo...

Emotions are often met with suspicion in political debates about risky technologies, because they are seen as contrary to rational decision making. However, recent emotion research rejects such a dichotomous view of reason and emotion, by seeing emotions as an important source of moral insight. Moral emotions such as compassion and feelings of resp...

Projects that deal with unconventional ways to produce, store, or transport energy often give rise to resistance by local communities. The value-laden basis of such resistance is often ignored by decision makers. This chapter operationalizes the concept of Responsible Innovation by using and adapting the approach of value sensitive design. This app...

The way pollution is managed in Western countries is based on the preservation of the taboo character of waste, which is conceived to be privately produced and seen as a threat to public health. Public authorities have been given the responsibility to isolate waste and hide it from public eyes. However, this dominant approach is challenged by the e...

This report aims at analyzing the state of today's knowledge and tools that is relevant for moving European cities towards climate neutrality. The report has been created using both literature sources as well as analyses of case studies from European cites. The main issues dealt with are how the concept of climate neutrality applies to cities, what...

Knowing that technologies are inherently value-laden and systemically interwoven with society, the question is how individual engineers can take up the challenge of accepting the responsibility for their work? This paper will argue that engineers have no institutional structure at the level of society that allows them to recognize, reflect upon, an...

This paper takes as a starting point that it is a broad societal responsibility to stimulate the development and uptake of sustainable innovations. In order to pursue this societal responsibility, insights derived from systems’ approaches to sustainable innovation will be connected to reflections on responsibility. A core understanding of systems’...

This article argues that a lack of a consistent agency-based approach in theory on sustainability transitions makes it difficult to describe processes of change. To overcome this problem, elements from transition theory will be rearticulated in terms of ‘discursive fields’, which are the bodies of meanings with which actors engage in social action....

The boundaries between the institutional domains of state, market, and science, appear to obstruct the effective management of sustainability problems: public and private interests, as well as supply and demand of knowledge, are often not aligned in cases of sustainable development. This suggests that in order to pursue sustainability, we have to e...

This article has a theoretical and a practical objective. The theoretical objective is to conceptualize responsible innovation as the adequate and timely inclusion of public values relevant to technological development. Technological innovations always occur in a specific institutional context, closely connected to stakeholder dynamics. Hence, an i...

Sustainable development poses demands that are usually not met by dominant patterns of political decision-making. Scenario workshops can be used as a method that allows policy decisions to be made according to the demands of sustainable development, which involve the attendance of a long-term future, the implementation of new technologies, and the...

In this paper we address the way boundary organizations can accommodate tensions in the science – politics interface. Literature on boundary organizations suggests that this type of organization can provide stability in science – politics interaction, but how these organizations function over a longer period of time is not a point of theoretical or...

The biobased economy is a concept proposed by policymakers to accommodate the transition towards a sustainable society. This concept however is not familiar outside of policymaking and some academic circles, while a socio-technical transition supposes the shared commitment of the whole society. The need for this commitments becomes even bigger as s...

Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) - understood as the formalised analytical activities initiated or carried out by central government administrations when designing specific policy instruments - is currently receiving high levels of political attention. It is seen as a tool to improve regulatory quality and to promote cross-cutting objectives such...

Procedural arrangements that safeguard accountable conduct of civil servants generally assume a univocal set of moral values. Yet public administration is characterized by a plurality of sets of values. The problems of the "many hands" and the "dirty-hands" make clear that activities of officials involve contrasting moral values. The absence of mor...

Public administration theory has always struggled to find a clear-cut understanding of the publicness of public administration. There are at least five different approaches to distinguish public from private organizations. A closer examination shows that these five approaches are based on two conceptual versions of the publicness of public administ...

Citizens’ juries are a form of “minipublics,” small-scale experiments with citizen participation in public decision-making. The article presents a theoretical argument that improves understanding relating to the design of the citizens’ jury. We develop the claim that two discourses on democracy can be discerned: the deliberative and the pluralist....

The book examines what is understood as the 'publicness' of 'public administration'. The original meanings which are given to the concept of publicness in political and social thought are traced and reformulated in terms of the study of public administration.

Participatory intervention methods can be seen as tools to solve the problems that are the results of locked-in institutional practices. To repair such institutional problems, participatory tools have to address three sets of questions.First, who to select as a participant, and what is the function of the selected participants? Second, how can lear...

As governmental goods and resources continue to undergo privatization, many wonder just what is “public” about public administration. The Predicaments of Publicness traces the development of this dilemma in modern political and social thought and then applies those theoretical findings to some of the most relevant practical issues in current pu...