Improving flood resilience through governance strategies: Gauging the state of the art

Abstract

There has been an upsurge in studies of flood risk governance (FRG): steering and decision-making by public and private actors as a complement to risk assessments and technical management options. The scholarly debate is, however, highly fragmented, complicating the production of cumulative insights. To address this knowledge gap, we used six governance strategies for achieving flood resilience that previously have been put forward as a conceptual framework to review 121 articles published between 2016 and 2019, complemented with insights contained in recent overview articles, to gauge the state-of-theart in FRG literature: to (a) diversify flood risk management strategies; (b) align the strategies; (c) adequately involve private actors, including citizens; (d) put an adequate rule system in place; (e) cater for sufficient monetary and non-monetary resources; (f) inspire an open and inclusive normative debate.We found, first, that literature is producing insights on increasingly technically advanced risk assessments and agent-based models but societal debate on justice in flood risk governance is getting attention. A clearly emerging topic is that of citizen engagement in flood risk governance. Second, the geographical focus of the studies is still skewed toward the Global North. To make progress in understanding flood risk governance for better resilience more systematic and comparative empirical assessments of flood risk governance in order to derive generalizable lessons while better taking into account the contextspecificity of FRG. Testing flood risk governance solutions against comparative cases, by balancing the geographical scope of research efforts, and enhancing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary working is a way to deliver knowledge for more resilience.

The Emergence of Different Local Resilience Arrangements Regarding Extreme Weather Events in Small Municipalities—A Case Study from the Wielkopolska Region, Poland

“…Figure 1 depicts a map of Poland with the indicated examined municipalities in the Wielkopolska region (a) and the land-cover type of the selected municipalities (b). cities (36). The urbanization rate is 56.4% and is lower than the average for Poland.…”

“…The authors developed a tool to assess the implementation of adaptation solutions in the communities of the Nysa Kłodzka Sub-Basin. Flood risk and flood risk governance arrangements are frequently examined in Poland, using the resilience concept (e.g., [34][35][36][37]). Masik and Gajewski [38] focused on the urban resilience of Polish cities in response to climate change.…”

“…The settlement network of the Wielkopolska region consists of 109 cities and 5500 villages. A characteristic feature of the area is the large number of small towns, which account for nearly half of all cities (50), and a relatively large number of medium-sized cities (36). The urbanization rate is 56.4% and is lower than the average for Poland.…”

Land Policy for Flood Risk Management—Toward a New Working Paradigm

“…The term Flood Risk Governance (FRG) (Bergsma, 2019; Hegger et al., 2014; Heintz et al., 2012) includes: Describing a complementary approach to FRM as a means to overcome the limitations of structural protection approaches (Kundzewicz & Takeuchi, 1999), by providing general goals, responsibilities and directions—and by facilitating normative debate (Matczak & Hegger, 2021) Preparing FRM measures and engaging with private landowners, requires concerted efforts and dedicated finances to support iterative processes from the initial step to final completion—and beyond Cooperation and coordination, along with communication of flood risks are considered essential to implement solutions in a sustainable way (Kellens et al., 2013; Priest et al., 2016) …”

“…Describing a complementary approach to FRM as a means to overcome the limitations of structural protection approaches (Kundzewicz & Takeuchi, 1999), by providing general goals, responsibilities and directions—and by facilitating normative debate (Matczak & Hegger, 2021)…”