Serge Santoo – Founder of Polycentric

“Energy transition only works in our view when it’s just, fair, inclusive and works for everybody — not only the people with the biggest mouths or the deepest pockets.”

Meet Serge

• As a child, Serge’s grandmother told him he had “a too strong opinion about everything and a too large mouth for a three-year-old” — a trait he’d eventually turn into a career built on asking difficult questionsand refusing easy answers.
• He first considered political sciences, then journalism, before pursuing a degree in Innovation Management and Communication Sciences. Corporate life followed, but he had an issue with the lack of purpose, realising the importance of maximizing impact, not profit.
• A move into the TU Delft ecosystem led him to become the co-founder and Marketing Manager of the Green Village, the university’s living lab for sustainable innovation, where he spent five and a half years bridging technical researchers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and citizens.
• In 2019, he left the semi-academic world to found Polycentric, a consulting company focused on stakeholder engagement, communication management, and social innovation in the Dutch energy transition.

Sector

Stakeholder Engagement & the Dutch Energy Transition

• Polycentric works primarily, though not exclusively, on the Dutch energy transition through public-private collaborations that often also involve scientific partners.
  The sector’s default lens, in Serge’s view, has long been technological: “if we can build it, then it exists.” Polycentric’s role is to bring in the human factor that tends to be left out of the otherwise purely technical framing.
• Energy transition decisions increasingly compete for physical space — streets, neighborhoods, land otherwise used for playgrounds or housing — which makes them inherently political, and therefore in need of a politically just and fair decision-making process.
• Polycentric also engages with the harder edges of the sector: the global justice dimension of the transition (for example, the raw-material trade-offs behind electric vehicles), and emerging shifts toward energy digitisation, European strategic energy autonomy, and a renewed interest in nuclear power.

Skills

Want to find out how Serge built Polycentric?

• Serge built his practice around “polycentric” thinking, drawing on Elinor Ostrom’s work on polycentric governance: no single actor, institution, or perspective — not government, not companies, not technical experts — should dominate a decision-making process. The job is to genuinely understand and connect all relevant perspectives toward a shared challenge.
• He distinguishes consensus from consent: people don’t need to agree with an outcome to consent to it, provided the decision-making process is transparent, and everyone feels fairly treated. Building that kind of trust, he argues, is central to successful transitions.
• Serge treats conflict and criticism as material, not obstacles — “a complaint is a gift” — because pushback signals engagement and often surfaces perspectives a project would otherwise miss.
  Team building, for Serge, has largely run through personal networks and word of mouth — a mutual friend, a friend of an employee, contacts through academic incubators — rather than formal recruitment. He looks for people motivated by meaningful, value-aligned work rather than salary alone, and deliberately builds a multidisciplinary team where everyone has a voice.
• He also learned to say no on principle: Polycentric once turned down a large energy company’s request to simplify its approach to permitting, because doing so would have reduced genuine citizen engagement to box-ticking.

Advice & Tips

“I do not believe in hope. I do believe in doing.”

• Don’t just have a sensible idea: take sensible action. Put your ideas into an organisation or a project, not just into words.
• Don’t build an overarching master plan that tries to account for every uncertainty. Have a core idea, iterate it, test it with stakeholders, customers, and experts, and pivot when it doesn’t fit.
• Surround yourself with people who complement your own skills and make sure everyone on the team has a genuine voice.
• Be curious about people beyond their CV — what drives someone professionally is inseparable from who they are as a person.
• Embrace conflict and criticism rather than avoiding it; it’s often a sign that people care about the outcome.
• Dare to do things — but do them together.

• Curriculum Vitae

  Polycentric – Founder, Director, and Senior Advisor [2020–Present]
  Dorcas Aid International, Water Expert – Climate Adaptation & Resilience Team, [2025-present]
  The Green Village, TU Delft, Co-founder, Manager of Marketing, Communication & Co-creation ([2015-2020]
  Rabobank Zuid-Holland Midden – Corporate Marketing Manager [2008-2015]
  Intrum Justitia – Team Manager Operations SME, [2001-2008]
  Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Nature – Employee Department of Information, [1997-2000]

Connection to the Hub

Polycentric has been based at The Hague Humanity Hub for roughly three and a half years. Serge was recently a featured guest in our event series, The Handshake, as part of the Ready to Engage: Pathways to Climate Justice Programme.