THE FLAT fields of reclaimed marshland that make up most of the Netherlands’ agricultural landscape are known as “polders”. In recent decades the word has come to designate a Dutch style of governance, the “polder model”, in which competing social stakeholders negotiate how to tackle collective problems. The idea is that this resembles the way medieval Dutch nobles and farmers haggled over maintaining the dikes and canals that kept their polders above water—and over how to split the bill.

The latest round of Dutch “poldering” also concerns a sea-level-related threat. On June 28th the government released its national Climate Accord, the product of over a year of bargaining between industry, consumer groups and politicians over how to meet the Netherlands’ targets for reducing carbon emissions. Under the global climate agreement signed in Paris in 2016, the country committed to cut its CO2 emissions by 49% by 2030 and by 95% by 2050. The question was how to do it, and who would pay.

To work this out the government convened negotiating groups in five sectors: electric power generation, the built environment, industry, agriculture and transport. Some sectors were readier than others, says Kees Vendrik, a senator from the GreenLeft party who chaired the electric power group’s negotiations: “With electricity it went well. With industry it didn’t.” The power sector has been moving towards renewable energy for years, and its new commitments mainly entail more wind turbines in the North Sea and retiring coal plants sooner.

Dutch heavy industry, however, argued that forcing it to cut emissions sharply would simply raise costs and shift activity abroad. Other sectors pledged everything from replacing gas stoves with electric induction in housing, to a possible per-kilometre charge on driving cars. Farmers agreed to reduce the emissions of the country’s noisome pigs.

The aim of the polder model is to create consensus for difficult measures by making all big players jointly responsible for the plan. Yet when the initial draft of the climate accord was presented in December, it created a wave of political anxiety. Voters worried about the costs to drivers, and the costs to homeowners of replacing their gas boilers with expensive new heat pumps. Many wondered why the Dutch should be “the class goody-goodies”, fulfilling their climate obligations while other countries ignore them.

In fact, although the Netherlands is widely seen as a country of cyclists and Greenpeace activists, it has one of the worst records in Europe on carbon emissions. In 2017, the last year for which data are available, it put out 12 tonnes per person, more than notorious coal junkies like Poland and Germany. This is largely down to heavy industries such as petrochemicals concentrated around Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port. Aviation and energy-intensive greenhouse agriculture also play a role.