Climate change, ecological degradation and socio-economic developments are increasingly putting pressure on people’s living environments. Societies, regions and cities need to increase their resilience through adaptive governance, which is their capacity to adapt to changing relationships between society and ecosystems. In this article, we explore how three core conditions for adaptive governance, referred to as; 1) discourse arenas, 2) epistemic networks and 3) leadership, have proved to be useful in the shaping of the Markermeer-IJmeer region, part of the Amsterdam Metropole Region in the Netherlands. We find that discourse arenas and epistemic networks have set the scene for societal actors to invest in a sustainable transformation of the area. Moreover, they were a push factor for the transformation of opinions how to govern and plan the area. Actors identified links to overcome the division between socio-economic development and environmental conservation in the Amsterdam Metropole region. Actors from the industry took steps to include nature conservation. We recommend that adaptive governance should be enhanced with notions such as discourse, learning, trust, responsibility and leadership in future research and policy making for resilient urban areas