Challenge
The Province of Gelderland plays a key role in shaping the spatial, economic and environmental future of the region. Climate change increasingly impacts all policy domains: heat stress in cities, drought affecting agriculture and nature, flooding risks, and pressure on infrastructure and public space.
In the provincial coalition agreement, climate adaptation is explicitly recognised as a necessary condition for future-proof development. The province aims to ensure that spatial and economic development is resilient to climate impacts and contributes to a safe, healthy and liveable environment.
Quote from the coalition agreement: ‘’Climate adaptation and circularity: We aim for a climate-resilient and circular Gelderland in everything we do.’’
For this year’s SDG-challenge (2026) we have formulated the following core question:
‘’How can the Province of Gelderland effectively motivate and enable internal teams and members of the provincial council to actively and structurally integrate climate adaptation into their daily work and policymaking?’
Problem definition
The province is organised according to a layered managerial structure (see the organisation chart in attached files). Within this structure, the organisation is divided into various administrative and operational levels. One of the organisational units is Programming, in which civil servants work in multidisciplinary teams on substantive thematic issues, these are organised into multiple programmes such as Economy, Mobility, Energy, Rural development and Spatial Planning. As you can see, Climate Adaptation is not explicitly shown in the structure, since it is embedded under the thematic issue of Water.
Therefore Climate Adaptation does not automatically function as an overarching principle across the organization. It is in practice often still treated as a separate theme rather than a guiding principle. Last year, an internal study by one of our colleagues analysed to what extent different teams already incorporate climate adaptation.
The results were:
This study provides a starting point for your work. Instead of repeating the analysis, we want you to build further upon it and focus on helping us understand how behaviour does or does not change, and how it can change in the future.
The province of Gelderland does already have an internal group focused on researching and stimulating behavioural change, but almost all of their work is aimed outwards, towards external parties and not within the Province and its teams itself. Their expertise in this area might prove useful for exchanging information and offer chances for working together towards a solution if seen as desirable.
Sub-questions might look like:
Examples of deliverable products:
We want the challenge to result in a practical behavioural approach that ensures teams feel ownership of climate adaptation and act accordingly. Our goal with this is to integrate climate adaptation into policy and projects across all domains and make climate-resilient thinking a standard part of governmental decision-making.
Ideally, success means that employees automatically consider climate adaptation in policy proposals, feel responsible for it, actively ask for it in projects, and see it as part of their normal work rather than an external obligation. This is an aspirational scenario, and each step towards it already significantly supports our objectives.
Being a part of organising the SDG-challenge these past few years and collaborating with students was a definite success from our perspective, and we are looking forward to working with a fresh and multidisciplinary team of students again, and to incorporate their academic insights, so we can build further upon them to realise the change we would like to achieve within our organisation.
The province of Gelderland is a provincial government in the Netherlands. The province of Gelderland lies in the east of the centre of the Netherlands. In terms of area (5,137 km2) it is the largest of the twelve provinces of the Netherlands. Gelderland’s 51 municipalities are home to 2 million inhabitants. The region has a varied landscape with forests, large rivers and rural areas. You will also find modern urban hubs such as Arnhem, Nijmegen and Wageningen with international secondary schools and universities supporting the knowledge-based economy.
