About Willemijn van Doorn - Hoekveld

Willemijn van Doorn-Hoekveld is a legal advisor on environmental law, specialising in the legal aspects of activities in the physical environment. At Deltares, this focuses on soil and water systems. The intention to have water and soil as a guiding principle requires a multidisciplinary approach. Besides technical knowledge and spatial planning, legal information is also needed for policymakers, administrators and society to make choices in line with this policy.

Willemijn tests the solutions proposed by Deltares on the basis of research against relevant legal frameworks and the institutional context, so that these solutions can actually be realised. Willemijn clarifies the frameworks, advises on the legal playing field and the opportunities offered by law. She does this in projects on groundwater recharge, wastewater reuse, water safety, Water and Soil Steering and the energy transition. In this way, she contributes to the translation of knowledge into feasible measures and ultimately to the impact Deltares makes.

How this decision-making takes place as equitably as possible keeps Willemijn engaged. When interventions in the physical living environment, such as dyke reinforcements or changes in land use to prevent flooding, people may suffer damage, for example expropriation or devaluation of their house or land. The question of how this distribution of benefits (increased flood protection on the one hand) and burdens (damage experienced by certain groups on the other hand) can be distributed as equitably as possible was the subject of her doctoral thesis ‘Distributional Effects of EU Flood Risk Management and the Law’ and other publications.

Questions such as how decisions around, for example, flood safety and freshwater availability can have as few negative effects as possible, while maximising positive effects, are becoming increasingly urgent. And where are the responsibilities between private owners and public organisations, for example when it comes to foundation damage due to a changing groundwater level? On the latter, Willemijn advises at the Knowledge Centre for Subsidence and Foundations (KBF).

Willemijn is a visiting researcher at the Utrecht Centre for Water, Oceans and Sustainability Law of the Faculty of Law, Economics and Governance at Utrecht University