Ann Crabbé

Coproducing flood risk management through citizen involvement: insights from cross-country comparison in Europe

Across Europe, citizens are increasingly expected to participate in the implementation of flood risk management (FRM), by engaging in voluntary-based activities to enhance preparedness, implementing property-level measures, and so forth. Although citizen participation in FRM decision making is widely addressed in academic literature, citizens’ involvement in the delivery of FRM measures is comparatively understudied. Drawing from public administration literature, we adopted the notion of “coproduction” as an analytical framework for studying the interaction between citizens and public authorities, from the decision-making process through to the implementation of FRM in practice. We considered to what extent coproduction is evident in selected European Union (EU) member states, drawing from research conducted within the EU project STAR-FLOOD (Strengthening and Redesigning European Flood Risk Practices towards Appropriate and Resilient Flood Risk Governance Arrangements). On the basis of a cross-country comparison between Flanders (Belgium), England (United Kingdom), France, the Netherlands, and Poland, we have highlighted the varied forms of coproduction and reflected on how these have been established within divergent settings. Coproduction is most prominent in discourse and practice in England and is emergent in France and Flanders. By contrast, FRM in the Netherlands and Poland remains almost exclusively reliant on governmental protection measures and thereby consultation-based forms of coproduction. Analysis revealed how these actions are motivated by different underlying rationales, which in turn shape the type of approaches and degree of institutionalization of coproduction. In the Netherlands, coproduction is primarily encouraged to increase societal resilience, whereas public authorities in the other countries also use it to improve cost-efficiency and redistribute responsibilities to its beneficiaries.

The marathon of the hare and the tortoise: implementing the EU Water Framework Directive

Reading the available evidence on the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD), one gets the impression that some countries anticipate implementation problems by starting off pragmatically and with relatively low ambitions, while others make a quick and ambitious start and tend to slow down in later phases of the process. Inspired by Lundqvists classical study of air pollution policy in the USA and Sweden, we assess the importance of some general characteristics of the respective political-institutional systems to explain differences in WFD implementation in four EU countries: Denmark, France, England/Wales and the Netherlands. We conclude, among other things, that visibility of the policy process, accountability of politicians and policy makers vis-à-vis their stakeholders and the EU, division of responsibilities for policy formulation vs. implementation and the involvement of the public explain the level of ambition in EU implementation to a considerable extent. Thus, the Lundqvist variables turn out to be useful for both classifying and explaining differences in EU implementation processes.

The Institutional Dynamics of Water Management in the Low Countries

‘Institutionalisation’ refers to ongoing processes of both renewal and stabilisation of policy practices. From this angle, water management is particularly interesting, because of its history – it is one of the oldest community-based tasks in the Low Countries – and because of its dynamics in recent times. Water institutions are both deeply rooted in historical traditions and contested in the last few years. In this chapter we want to describe and interpret the institutional dynamics, by means of comparing the water policy arrangements in the Netherlands and Flanders. The central empirical question in this chapter is: what impact does ‘integrated water management’ (IWM), as a new element in the discourse on water policy, have on the organizational dimensions of water policy arrangements? In both countries IWM was introduced, but the impact and the usage of the concept differ. Further, this empirical question is linked to theories of institutional change: what circumstances explain a different reception of IWM in both countries? Why do some of the dimensions of the policy arrangement show stability in time while others are more dynamic? And, are the institutional changes to be considered shallow or deep? The water policy arrangements are analysed on the level of the sector based, national policy arrangements, whereby Flemish policy replaces the Belgium level of governmental interference because of the country’s federal structure. We could have chosen underlying aggregation levels, e.g. only water quality issues or only flooding management, and reach far more detail. For purposes of international comparison however, and to relate our findings to ‘systemic’ institutional changes, it is better to focus on the national level. After explaining our theoretical framework in the first section, the second section will ‘set the scene’ with a description of the characteristics of Flemish and Dutch water policy arrangements in the early 1990s.

Is flood defense changing in nature? Shifts in the flood defense strategy in six European countries

In many countries, flood defense has historically formed the core of flood risk management but this strategy is now evolving with the changing approach to risk management. This paper focuses on the neglected analysis of institutional changes within the flood defense strategies formulated and implemented in six European countries (Belgium, England, France, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden). The evolutions within the defense strategy over the last 30 years have been analyzed with the help of three mainstream institutional theories: a policy dynamics-oriented framework, a structure-oriented institutional theory on path dependency, and a policy actors-oriented analysis called the advocacy coalitions framework. We characterize the stability and evolution of the trends that affect the defense strategy in the six countries through four dimensions of a policy arrangement approach: actors, rules, resources, and discourses. We ask whether the strategy itself is changing radically, i.e., toward a discontinuous situation, and whether the processes of change are more incremental or radical. Our findings indicate that in the European countries studied, the position of defense strategy is continuous, as the classical role of flood defense remains dominant. With changing approaches to risk, integrated risk management, climate change, urban growth, participation in governance, and socioeconomic challenges, the flood defense strategy is increasingly under pressure to change. However, these changes can be defined as part of an adaptation of the defense strategy rather than as a real change in the nature of flood risk management.

Flood risk mitigation in Europe: how far away are we from the aspired forms of adaptive governance?

Flood mitigation is a strategy that is growing in importance across Europe. This growth corresponds with an increasing emphasis on the need to learn to live with floods and make space for water. Flood mitigation measures aim at reducing the likelihood and magnitude of flooding and complement flood defenses. They are being put in place through the implementation of actions that accommodate (rather than resist) water, such as natural flood management or adapted housing. The strategy has gained momentum over the past 20 years in an effort to improve the sustainability of flood risk management (FRM) and facilitate the diversification of FRM in the pursuit of societal resilience to flooding. Simultaneously, it is increasingly argued that adaptive forms of governance are best placed to address the uncertainty and complexity associated with social-ecological systems responding to environmental challenges, such as flooding. However, there have been few attempts to examine the extent to which current flood risk governance, and flood mitigation specifically, reflect these aspired forms of adaptive governance. Drawing from EU research into flood risk governance, conducted within the STAR-FLOOD project, we examine the governance of flood mitigation in six European countries: Belgium, England, France, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden. Using in-depth policy and legal analysis, as well as interviews with key actors, the governance and implementation of flood mitigation in these countries is evaluated from the normative viewpoint of whether, and to what extent, it can be characterized as adaptive governance. We identify five criteria of adaptive governance based on a comprehensive literature review and apply these to each country to determine the “distance” between current governance arrangements and adaptive governance. In conclusion, the flood mitigation strategy provides various opportunities for actors to further pursue forms of adaptive governance. The extent to which the mitigation strategy is capable of doing so varies across countries, however, and its role in stimulating adaptive governance was found to be strongest in Belgium and England.

Conditions for citizen co-production in a resilient, efficient and legitimate flood risk governance arrangement. A tentative framework

ABSTRACT Across Europe, there is an increasing trend towards citizen involvement in the implementation of flood risk governance. Policy-makers increasingly advocate co-produced flood risk governance (FRG), whereby citizens are actively engaged in the implementation of flood risk policy, for example, by taking property-level protection measures. In doing so, they aim to make FRG more resilient, efficient and legitimate [Mees, H., Crabbé, A., Alexander, M., Kaufmann, M., Bruzzone, L., Levy, L., & Lewandowski, J. (2016a). Coproducing flood risk management through citizen involvement: Insights from cross-country comparison in Europe. Ecology and Society, 21(3), 7. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08500-210307]. Co-production, however, also raises important questions concerning these aims. In this paper, the opportunities and limitations of and barriers to citizen co-production in FRG in terms of resilience, efficiency and legitimacy are investigated by an extensive review of literature on citizen co-production in other public services and on individual and community-based climate change adaptation and FRG. Based on this, a tentative framework is developed on the required conditions to enable co-produced FRG, which benefits both the resilience, efficiency and legitimacy of FRG.

Participation in Spatial Planning for Sustainable Cities: The Importance of a Learning-by-Doing Approach

Megatrends like climate change, population growth and economic transitions put cities to the test and impact their future. City governments acknowledge the importance of spatial planning to mitigate the problems they are facing, for example by greening the city, infill development, smart reintegration of making industry in the city, etc. Our contribution focuses on the potential of multi-actor governance in spatial planning for social learning on these challenges.

Explaining stability and change. Comparing flood risk governance in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Poland

The closing article of this special issue provides a comparative analysis of flood risk governance (FRG) in four European countries and tries to explain why FRG in the Netherlands and Poland is more stable than in Belgium and France. It examines the role of mechanisms of path dependency and path change. Inspired by the conceptual framework developed in the introductory article (Wiering et al. 2017), this article provides an overview of dynamics in FRG in the four countries and identifies major trends and tendencies. It discusses forces of stability and change and hypothesises on how ‘clusters’ of these forces tend to interact. It is found, among other things, that new ideas are often crucial for initiating change and that fixed costs and the sedimented distribution of responsibilities are stabilising factors. Bringing together various existing theories, the article contributes to literature on flood risk management and public policy change.

Belgian flood risk governance: Explaining the dynamics within a fragmented governance arrangement

Despite some inertia, flood risk governance in Belgium has been fairly dynamic between 1995 and 2015. In this paper, change and stability during this period are described and explained in the four dimensions of the Policy Arrangement Approach: actors, discourses, rules and resources. The analysis is based on 72 semi-structured stakeholder interviews and legal document analysis. Belgian flood risk governance is characterised by a high level of fragmentation. Our analysis found that this can form a barrier to change, but at the same time it creates multiple entry points for policy innovation and thereby increases the dynamics within the governance arrangement.