Multi-actor governance: Making sense and managing sensitivities while developing MFFD

Dealing with collaboration challenges in integrated spatial projects Almost everybody agrees that the environmental challenges we are currently facing need to be approached in an integrated manner, from governments to citizens, and from companies to research institutes (Brown 2008; Brown & Farrelly 2009). To create multifunctional flood defenses, innovative integrated solutions are needed so that land use, responsibilities, financing, as well as risk-taking, are all shared. When developing integrated spatial projects, such as multifunctional flood defenses, the focus is increasingly on multidisciplinary cooperation between actors from different institutions, based on the assumption that collaboration allows knowledge to be shared and thus produces integrated spatial developments (BNA 2016; Janssen 2015; Healy 1998, 2006). But the intense collaboration involved in such projects is not as straightforward as it might appear.