The state of urgency self-evidently does not provide the ideal circumstances for making the best decisions. Urgency leads decision-makers to act rather emotionally than rationally driven. Unfortunately, urgency occurs quite often especially within the scope of mega-projects. In his research article, jointly published with Prof. Itay Fischhendler, Josef van Wijk conducts a discourse analysis on explanatory factors for why, when and how actors construct urgency and how that influences policy making. The discourse analysis is applied to the Israeli energy mega-project National Outline Plan 37/H, which is a project on the handling of the off coast natural gas resources discovered in 2009.

In April 2016, Josef van Wijk has participated in the annual UAS Spring Campus. There he attended Miranda Schreurs’ Research Workshop “Climate Governance in International Comparison”. As part of this workshop, Josef van Wijk had already given an introduction to his research project. The presentation can be found here.

The complete research article is provided for free under this link.