Globally, flood frequency has increased over the last three decades. Natural Flood Management (NFM) is considered a progressive holistic flood management approach, using “natural” hydrological processes to slow and store water, delivering multiple benefits including water quality, biodiversity and amenity improvements. Although there are existing evaluations of NFM, they remain insufficient for drawing conclusions as to its effectiveness at catchment scales. However, without this evidence base and because of the domination of the natural sciences in the framing and research agenda, catchment‐wide interventions have not been implemented. In acknowledging the importance of understanding and data gaps (and attempts to fill them), this paper argues that there is an opportunity to deliver NFM more widely by capitalising on widespread interest in different land and water management sectors, supported by interdisciplinary policy‐relevant research. This paper illustrates how multi‐stakeholder collaborative partnership is suited to the dynamic complexity of NFM delivery. It is proposed that, through championing NFM delivery at catchment scales and the work of established catchment partnerships in England and Wales, there is the opportunity to more widely deliver NFM as an integrated component of flood risk management.

Achieving urban flood resilience at local, regional and national levels requires a transformative change in planning, design and implementation of urban water systems. Flood risk, wastewater and stormwater management should be re-envisaged and transformed to: ensure satisfactory service delivery under flood, normal and drought conditions, and enhance and extend the useful lives of ageing grey assets by supplementing them with multi-functional Blue-Green infrastructure. The aim of the multidisciplinary Urban Flood Resilience (UFR) research project, which launched in 2016 and comprises academics from nine UK institutions, is to investigate how transformative change may be possible through a whole systems approach. UFR research outputs to date are summarised under three themes. Theme 1 investigates how Blue-Green and Grey (BG + G) systems can be co-optimised to offer maximum flood risk reduction, continuous service delivery and multiple co-benefits. Theme 2 investigates the resource capacity of urban stormwater and evaluates the potential for interoperability. Theme 3 focuses on the interfaces between planners, developers, engineers and beneficiary communities and investigates citizens’ interactions with BG + G infrastructure. Focussing on retrofit and new build case studies, UFR research demonstrates how urban flood resilience may be achieved through changes in planning practice and policy to enable widespread uptake of BG + G infrastructure.

Climate change adaptation creates significant challenges for decision makers in the flood riskmanagement policy domain. Given the complex characteristics of climate change, adaptive approaches (which can be adjusted as circumstances evolve) are deemed necessary to deal with a range of uncertainties around flood hazard and its impacts and associated risks. The question whether implementing adaptive approaches is successful highly depends upon how the administrative tradition of a country enable or hinder applying a more adaptive approach. In this article, we discern how the administrative tradition in the Netherlands, England, and New Zealand impact upon the introduction of adaptive flood risk management approaches. Using the concept of administrative traditions, we aim to explain the similarities and/or differences in how adaptive strategies are shaped and implemented in the three different state flood management regimes and furthermore, which aspects related to administrative traditions are enablers or barriers to innovation in these processes. La adaptaci on al cambio clim atico crea cambios significativos para los que toman decisiones en el sector de pol ıtica de gesti on de riesgos. Dadas las caracter ısticas complejas del cambio clim atico, los acercamientos adaptativos (que pueden ser ajustados seg un la evoluci on de las circunstancias) se consideran necesarios para lidiar con el rango de incertidumbre en el tema de los peligros de inundaci on y sus impactos y riesgos asociados. La pregunta de si el implementar acercamientos adaptativos es exitoso depende de c omo la tradici on administrativa de un pa ıs habilita o dificulta el utilizar un acercamiento m as adaptativo. En este art ıculo discernimos c omo la tradici on administrativa en pa ıses bajos, Inglaterra y Nueva Zelanda tienen un impacto en el uso de aproximaciones adaptativas de gesti on de riesgos de inundaci on. Al utilizar el concepto de las tradiciones administrativas, buscamos explicar las similitudes y/o diferencias en c omo las estrategias adaptativas obtienen su forma y son implementadas en tres diferentes reg ımenes de manejo de inundaciones estatales y asimismo, qu e aspectos relacionados a las tradiciones administrativas son habilitadores o barreras para la innovaci on en estos procesos.PALABRAS CLAVE: adaptaci on al cambio clim atico, tradiciones administrativas, gesti on adaptativa de riesgos de inundaci on, cambio pol ıtico, implementaci on

Municipal waste management strategies (MWMSs) are local level policy instruments, prepared in an area wide manner all over England, aiming to achieve more sustainable waste management practices. Their focus is on different aspects of the waste management hierarchy, including waste reduction, reuse, recycling/composting and residual waste management. In this paper, a systematic review of MWMS strategic environmental assessments (SEAs), completed by February 2010 is provided. SEA report quality and the extent to which climate change mitigation is considered are evaluated. Whilst there are strengths of current practice, there is also scope for improvement, particularly regarding a more effective consideration of the waste management hierarchy. Furthermore, whilst climate change mitigation is routinely considered as an overall objective, none of the SEAs set related targets, for example regarding carbon emission reduction.

In the future, increasing pressure will inevitably be placed on the spatial planning system to improve its consideration of water management issues. Emerging challenges include designing for climatic extremes, reducing flood risk, managing increasingly scarce water resources and improving water quality. These issues need to be balanced with a range of other spatial planning priorities and objectives, including meeting new housing needs, facilitating economic growth, and creating and maintaining quality places. The sheer complexity of the issues surrounding water management and the impacts upon spatial planning mean that partnership working is essential to achieve an integrated approach. Planners need the expertise, and crucially the understanding, of engineers and hydrologists. However, there can be considerable misunderstanding and miscommunication between disciplines, often concerning the institutional context in which the various parties operate. A plethora of policies, tools and assessments exist, which can make integrated water management an overwhelming prospect for the planner. This paper attempts to identify and address some of the issues faced, as well as examining how planners embed hydrological issues in decision making and how engineers could better facilitate this.

In academic and professional circles, ‘resilience thinking’ has emerged as the dominant paradigm in flood risk management, which emphasizes the need to plan and design cities that can absorb water and replicate natural processes more closely. In this paper, we explore how planners in England are expected to respond to the resilience agenda against the realities in practice, zoning in on the delivery of sustainable (urban) drainage systems (SuDS). Our exploration highlights that, while SuDS are being implemented, they are largely characterized by a ‘bog standard’ design. We found that there are three main institutional factors that are constraining the implementation of SuDS: the lack of legislative backing, the power afforded to private commercial interests in the neoliberalized planning process, compounded by the severe lack of resources in local authorities. What is missing at the moment is SuDS process and design that is flexible, integrated, collaborative and innovative. There are clear implications that, without the necessary institutional support, resilience thinking will remain largely aspirational, and professionals will struggle to gain traction and translate the larger flood resilience policy agenda into England's future climate-resilient places. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Urban flood resilience’.

Following a series of flood events, the major flooding of 2007 finally triggered legislative change through the Flood and Water Management Act of 2010 and proposed the introduction of Schedule 3 (S3), to provide a stronger regulatory system for the implementation of sustainable drainage systems (SuDS). However, S3 has been abandoned in England in favour of implementing SuDS through a "strengthened" planning system. By taking a broader governance perspective, this article explores the limited uptake of SuDS through the strengthened planning system. We argue that the so-called strengthening of the planning system creates an institutional void: a lack of policy clarity that occurs when the role of the state is scaled back and other actors take up governance roles. While institutional voids can create successful outcomes, in the case of SuDS implementation they have been sub-optimal. We trace the cause of these outcomes to the unwillingness of the Government to engage in designing policy. This creates a lack of consistency and uniformity, as the implementation of SuDS becomes a matter of ad hoc negotiations and power relations between local authorities and developers. We conclude that the current policy has reduced potential to deliver better outcomes and highlight the options for increased SuDS uptake going forward. K E Y W O R D Sgovernance and institutions, institutional void, Schedule 3, spatial planning, surface water, sustainable drainage systems

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