Challenges and Success Factors of Realizing Floating Projects—From the Perspectives of Dutch Experts in Floating City Development

Floating development has recently gained increasing interests worldwide as a more climate-adaptive and future-proof alternative to land reclamation. The Netherlands is often considered to be a global leader in creating living space on the water and has abundant experiences and knowledge accumulated on developing floating structures for living and recreational purposes. Such valuable knowledge can be shared with the rest of the world with to inspire more people to realize floating projects. This research aims to collect insights from the Dutch floating development experts, identifying patterns in their experiences and their outlook for upscaling floating development in the Netherlands and abroad. The study applies a semi-structured interview method, and 15 representative Dutch experts were interviewed from the technical (design & engineering) community of floating projects. The results show that the biggest challenge of implementing floating projects is the “lack of financial attractiveness and financing mechanism to support”. The most mentioned success factor is “having political support and visionary leadership”, and the most mentioned key to upscaling floating development has to do with “having the right partners, cross-sectoral collaboration and involving all stakeholders”. To upscale floating projects, the research concluded and recommended that “finding parties that demonstrate strong and visionary leadership”, “creating or scouting for opportunities which would enable a larger floating project showcase to be realized”, and “finding the best and most suitable location(s) in terms of wave conditions, logistics arrangement, manufacturing, and technical aspects”.