Hannelore Mees

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.

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.

Managing urban flood resilience as a multilevel governance challenge: an analysis of required multilevel coordination mechanisms

In both academic literature and flood risk management practices, it is argued that governance initiatives are needed to enhance the flood resilience of urban agglomerations. Multiple levels of gove ...

Governance Arrangements for the Adaptation to Climate Change

Adaptation to climate change is not only a technical issue; above all, it is a matter of governance. Governance is more than government and includes the totality of interactions in which public as well as private actors participate, aiming to solve societal problems. Adaptation governance poses some specific, demanding challenges, such as the context of institutional fragmentation, as climate change involves almost all policy domains and governance levels; the persistent uncertainties about the nature and scale of risks and proposed solutions; and the need to make short-term policies based on long-term projections. Furthermore, adaptation is an emerging policy field with, at least for the time being, only weakly defined ambitions, responsibilities, procedures, routines, and solutions. Many scholars have already shown that complex problems, such as adaptation to climate change, cannot be solved in a straightforward way with actions taken by a hierarchic or monocentric form of governance. This raises the question of how to develop governance arrangements that contribute to realizing adaptation options and increasing the adaptive capacity of society. A series of seven basic elements have to be addressed in designing climate adaptation governance arrangements: the framing of the problem, the level(s) at which to act, the alignment across sectoral boundaries, the timing of the policies, the selection of policy instruments, the organization of the science-policy interface, and the most appropriate form of leadership. For each of these elements, this chapter suggests some tentative design principles. In addition to effectiveness and legitimacy, resilience is an important criterion for evaluating these arrangements. The development of governance arrangements is always context- and time-specific, and constrained by the formal and informal rules of existing institutions.