Going British?
This week we have a guest post from Simon Peeters, a physicist based at Sussex University, giving a personal view on British-Dutch contrasts.
As a Dutch citizen in the UK, the project Going Dutch? naturally caught my attention. Both the UK and the Netherlands are currently using mainly gas for heating. Both countries want to move away from gas over the next decade. This project will look at the Netherlands for lessons that we can learn for the UK policy to achieve this. The culture in the two countries is quite different. Having lived in both countries, I thought I share my initial thoughts on this.
When I first moved to the UK, I left the Amsterdam red light district: a convenient and economical place to live for a student. Moving to one of the more renowned university cities in the UK, I expected to some adjustment was required to function in this more formal environment. However, on my first day in the UK, I started to think that there were perhaps less differences between the two countries, at least on the shadier sides of the society. The local newspaper described the worrying trends about drug use in the city and during the evening the centre of town was full of drunk young people. Fundamentally, people are the same everywhere.
However, I also became quickly aware of the enormous class differences that still dominate British society. For example, the centre of town, dominated by the elite university, looked immaculate. If you traveled slightly outside the centre, buildings immediately looked much more worn and tired. It seems to me that this class difference is one of the reasons of different approaches to policy in the two countries. In the UK, the approach for phasing-out gas follows a high-level, centralised strategy, whereas in the Netherlands there is a strong decentralisation. The Dutch approach originates from the polder model: a decision making method based on consensus. The word polder means a bit of land that is surrounded by dikes and kept dry by pumping. This describes most of the Netherlands. It is speculated that the reason why consensus-based decision making became commonplace in the Netherlands originates from the need for different Dutch communities to cooperate to keep the water at bay.
The polder model has been frowned upon by some: the verb 'polderen' is sometimes used to indicate long-winded decision making processes. However, there is also a wide recognition that it does lead to better decisions. And personally, I don't think that polderen is slower in the long term. For example: when I moved to the UK, a lot of everyday experiences seemed somewhat old fashioned to me. Obviously, there is the infamous absence of mixer taps in bathrooms. A less obvious example is that cheques were still common currency. Chip and pin was already common in the Netherlands, but only introducted in the UK four years after my arrival. I don't think this has changed: everytime I visit the Netherlands, I still feel I travel back to the future. I suspect that reason why the Netherlands seems to adopt new technologies more quickly than the UK is due to their consensus-based approach. It allows the opinion of people directly impacted by such changes to be more naturally included in policy making.
I am sure that the project Going Dutch? will find interesting examples that are of use to the UK. Another way to look at this has been beautifully put into words by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. To paraphrase him: If you want to build a ship, you don't give orders to men and women, but teach them to yearn for the endless sea. Whether and how these examples can be implemented in the UK, we will have to investigate.
Note: This blog post originally appeared at Simon Peeters’ blog The Physics of Going Green
