Leendertse, Wim
Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, the Netherlands
Academic background
Wim Leendertse has been working for the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment(formerly the Ministry of Transport and Public Works), the Directorate General of Rijkswaterstaatsince 1982. He started working after receiving a master in civil engineering at Delft University as a project engineer for the Eastern Scheldt Storm Surge Barrier, one of the biggest projects in the Netherlands at that time. He received a bachelor in 1992 at Nijmegen University in business administration (BBA). From 1993 up till 1997 he started and directed the Centre for Underground Construction. From 1998 up till 2001 he went back to the projects as managing director for the High Speed Line South Project, where he was among others responsible for the contracting and construction of the Green Heart Bored Tunnel, the biggest diameter tunnel in soft ground world wide at that moment.
The Green Heart Tunnel was at that time the first infrastructure project contracted as design-built in The Netherlands. In 2003 he worked at the Ministry of Economics on a project base introducing private involvement in the so called Gebiedsagenda’s and later at the Ministry of Finance to initiate the PPP directorate. After that he was asked to join the (new) staff of the Director General of Rijkswaterstaat to help reorganize the Rijkswaterstaat organization, especially in the field of PPP and market-government relations. Since 2007 he went back to the projects again. First as a project director for the Afsluitdijk project and after that as managing director of the ZuidasDok project in Amsterdam. Since 2009 Wim Leendertse is a senior/top advisor for Rijkswaterstaat in the field of project management and market involvement. Besides his carrier at Rijkswaterstaat.
Wim Leendertse is since 2009 part time lecturer at the Technical University Delft and the University of Groningen. Since February 2012 he is, besides his function as senior advisor for market involvement in large projects, also acting as contract/project manager for the New Harbour Crossing (Blankenburgverbinding) crossing the Nieuwe Maas river in Rotterdam. In this function he is among others responsible for the contracting of a major design-built-finance-maintain contract, a large integral contract for engineering and advice services through “best-value” procurement and the planning and contracting of a 25-year toll concession. In April 2015 he got a PhD in Spatial Sciences at the University of Groningen for his research on public-private interaction in infrastructure networks. Since then he is appointed a honorary lecturer in Infrastructure Planning at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences. Since Februar 2016 he is appointed project director on behalf of Rijkswaterstaat of Innova58, a project in the planning phase featuring an innovation program regarding ITS and smart mobility.