Tightly coupled policies and loosely coupled networks in the governing of flood risk mitigation in municipal administrations

Abstract

Flood risk is a complex and transboundary issue that is expected to escalate with climate change and requires to be governed by collaborative networks of actors. Municipal administrations have been suggested to have a particularly important and challenging role in such governance. Although collaborative governance has attracted intense scientific attention, empirical studies generally focus either on the macro-level institutions per se, or on the meso-level interaction between organizations, without corresponding attention to the micro-level interactions between the individual actors constituting the organizations and reproducing the institutions. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of how flood risk is governed within municipal administrations, by studying how actors interact within them when implementing tightly coupled policies. The paper draws on comparative case study research of three Swedish municipal administrations (Lomma, Lund, and Staffanstorp). Data were collected through interviews with all 143 actors actively contributing to mitigating flood risk within the municipal administrations, and analyzed structurally and interpretatively using social network analysis and qualitative analysis. Although the Swedish legal framework consists of tightly coupled policies demanding coordination between the actors implementing them, there is a recurrent pattern of relative integration between actors implementing policies for planning and water and sewage, and substantial separation between them and actors implementing policy for risk and vulnerability. This cinderellic fragmentation generates a "problem of fit" between the legal framework and the collaborative networks implementing it, which undermines the effectiveness of flood risk mitigation in municipal administrations. It is not accidental but a consequence of a directional separation of institutionalization, where the more bottom-up and problem-oriented institutionalization of practices in planning and water and sewage, and the more top-down and complianceoriented institutionalization of practices in risk and vulnerability pull the network of actors apart. I demonstrate how the mechanisms of increasing returns, commitments, and objectification may all operate simultaneously but to various degrees in different practices across any collaborative governance network. Hence, potentially undermining policy coherence, policy integration, and collaborative governance.

Emergence and institutionalization of interorganizational coordination structures in crises

“…While professional norms and expectations are generally carried over already at the start from whatever contexts the actors can imagine as similar, the mechanism of increasing commitments can either reinforce or alter them or create new ones, depending on what practices end up being implemented. However, this study suggests that the importance of increasing commitment is increasing over time, which has been suggested elsewhere (e.g., Becker, 2021). Increasing objectification, on the other hand, is generally of relatively less importance concerning the actual practices initially, since it takes time for something to become routinised to the extent that it is taken for granted, before becoming increasingly important compared to the other two mechanisms.…”

“…we have highlighted in this study. There are previous studies of preventive aspects of crisis management with similar results (Becker, 2021). However, in this study, we explicitly investigate the institutionalization of organizational solutions in the response phase.…”

“…As a result, interacting actors cocreate and adjust practices, incurring considerable time, energy and resource costs. North (1990) refers to this as high setup costs, and the concept of increasing returns is used to explain why even flawed practices are not altered even when they are apparent (Becker, 2021). North emphasizes the relevance of incentives and contends that the practices remain because further efforts in the same direction are rewarded, while the costs of switching to an alternative increase over time (Scott, 2014).…”

Assessing social-ecological fit of flood planning governance

“…Recent estimates place 1.47 billion people within direct exposure to flooding events (Rentschler and Salhab 2020), and climate change is forecasted to increase impacts of severe flooding in many regions (Tabari 2020, Hosseinzadehtalaei et al 2021, Mohanty and Simonovic 2021. As flood governance requires responsiveness at both the basin and sub-catchment levels (Niemczynowicz 1999, Savenije andVan der Zaag 2008), it is well positioned to benefit from collaborative forms of governance (Fournier et al 2016, Cumiskey et al 2019, Becker 2021, Clegg et al 2021. Collaborative approaches can connect a variety of sectors and stakeholders operating in different regions and at different administrative levels (Dieperink et al 2018, Bottazzi et al 2019.…”