Water as Leverage Academy: a two-way exchange between the Netherlands and South Florida

In April 2026, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima visited the University of Miami for the launch of the Water as Leverage (WaL) Academy in South Florida. They were accompanied by Minister of Infrastructure and Water Management Vincent Karremans and Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Sjoerd Sjoerdsma. The Academy brought Dutch and American water professionals together to exchange knowledge on urban water management and climate resilience through hands-on workshops. It marked the start of a practical partnership between the Netherlands and South Florida, with Rotterdam and Miami-Dade County as the first local cases.

The partnership didn’t start with the royal visit. In December 2025, the Dutch Consulate General in Miami organised a session for local resilience officers, where Dutch experts, including water envoy Meike van Ginneken, presented on Dutch approaches to water management. Rising water, increasingly frequent storms and heat are part of daily life in South Florida. These are challenges the Netherlands recognises, even if they take a different shape at home.

“We saw real overlap in what we’re up against,” says Johan Verlinde, programme manager of the City of Rotterdam’s climate adaptation programme Rotterdams Weerwoord, who travelled to Miami that month. Conversations with Miami-Dade County and the City of Miami followed. Both sides wanted a structured way to keep exchanging knowledge. “Water as Leverage offered exactly that,” says Monique Bennema, water management lead at the economic policy department of the Consulate General in Miami. By April, that idea had turned into a full workshop, organised by WaL, with the King and Queen of the Netherlands as guests of honour.

A platform for shared learning

WaL is a design-driven Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management programme, executed under Partners for Water. It helps cities address water challenges in an integrated, inclusive and sustainable way, bringing together local governments, designers, engineers and communities. The Academy is one of its three pillars: the platform for knowledge development and shared learning.

The Academy has a toolbox of methods for sharing knowledge. One of them is a “serious game”, where participants take on roles and work through a real local case together. Some Florida participants were sceptical at first. “They found it a bit strange to play a game,” says Bennema. But that quickly changed. “Some were so enthusiastic that a version was later played at a Waterfront Alliance event in New York, organised by participants who’d experienced it firsthand during the WaL session.”

The Academy runs similar sessions elsewhere too, from Thailand to Malaysia, and The Gambia to Indonesia, adapting the same method to each city’s own water challenges. In the partnership in South Florida, the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management drives the process together with the City of Rotterdam and the Consulate General. The Consulate General connected the Dutch and American partners on the ground.

Putting the method to work

The April workshop covered three real Florida cases. One focused on Biscayne Gardens. This flood-prone park can become a “sponge park”. “It can absorb water, but also release it again, like squeezing a sponge,” explains Bennema. It echoes the Dutch approach to water squares. A second case looked at Broward County’s plan to expand permeable surfaces by 2040, similar to Rotterdam’s own “NK Tegelwippen” campaign which replaces paving stones with green space. The third tackled the vast Southeast Coast watershed system, spanning the Everglades and coastal cities.

“Participants took on roles such as mayor, resident or engineer,” explains Verlinde. Each role came with its own stake in the outcome, which pushed the conversation past general talk into real trade-offs. “Everyone took it seriously,” he says. “By the end, each table had a set of concrete directions for its case, not just a shared understanding of the problem.” It showed how multidisciplinary cooperation can lead to more sustainable and integrated solutions.

The royal guests took part too. The King, drawing on his own background in water management, joined a workshop table and stayed engaged well beyond the schedule, while the Queen spoke with participants about the importance of Florida’s well-known water bodies like the Florida Everglades.

Learning from each other

The exchange goes both ways. Rotterdam is learning from Miami about heat and emergency response. “Miami has a dedicated Chief Heat Officer, cooling shelters, and clear public guidance on what to do in extreme heat,” says Verlinde. “That’s something we can learn from in the Netherlands.” He also points to how the region handles hurricanes: highways clear out, evacuations run smoothly, recovery is fast. “We’re very focused on prevention in the Netherlands,” he says. “But when something does happen, I think a lot of people don’t know exactly what to do.”

It reflects a broader contrast between the two. “The Netherlands has built its water management around prevention,” says Bennema. “Dikes, storage, a clear delta programme.” South Florida, less structured on that front, has instead built up strong experience in responding once disaster hits. “Whereas the Netherlands wants to learn more about disaster response, Miami-Dade is drawn to Rotterdam’s integrated approach,” she continues. “Tackling water, green spaces and community challenges in a single design that serves multiple purposes at once.” It’s exactly this kind of exchange – concrete and city-specific – that Rotterdam and Miami-Dade now want to keep building on.

The value of working city to city

Water keeps bringing people together at city level. It’s the shared, tangible problems – flooding, heat, water scarcity – that connect people. As Bennema puts it, city-to-city cooperation works because it links “people who are simply working on the same problem together.”

Looking back, both see this practical value in the WaL approach as well. “You go straight into a tangible problem in the city,” says Verlinde. “I don’t think you’d ever reach that level of detail in a regular meeting.” Bennema agrees. “This is a genuine two-way exchange,” she adds. “We’re bringing knowledge, and we’re picking something up too.”

City-to-city exchange is one part of the partnership. The Academy also looks at how Dutch national policy and Florida state policy can support action at city level. A central question is how different levels of government can link policy, knowledge and investment to locally owned action, while strengthening the resilience of communities, infrastructure and vital functions. Rotterdam and Miami-Dade County act as local cases for that question. The ambition is for the lessons to also inform policy discussions, including in the Netherlands.

What’s next

The collaboration itself is still exploratory. The ambition is to move from exploration to a practice-oriented learning partnership. A clear plan for the 2027 activities is expected by the end of this year.

In early October, students and faculty members from the University of Miami and the University of Pennsylvania travelled to the Netherlands, says Bennema. They took part in the first WaL Studio event in Delft. Together with Dutch partners from government, research and design, they explored examples of urban climate adaptation and joined a hands-on workshop on “spongy urbanism”. The day also helped shape a two-way knowledge agenda for the Academy in the US, so that lessons from Florida find their way back into Dutch practice.

Rotterdam and Miami-Dade are still just getting started. But both sides agree that the exchange is worth continuing.