Water Res. Manag. http://doi.org/tn5 (2014)

Credit: © ELVA ETIENNE / ALAMY

Flooding risk is increasing in European cities due to urbanization and climate change. Managing flood risk requires adequate governance arrangements — such as administrative structures and rules — but these are rarely assessed.

Dries L. T. Hegger, of Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and colleagues propose to evaluate the governance of flood risk arrangements with a framework that integrates insights from policy scientists and legal scholars — the policy arrangements approach (PAA). PAA assessments link all relevant aspects of a policy arrangement including actors, discourses (scientific paradigms, policy objectives, historical narratives and values), rules and resources. Using PAA, the researchers assess flood-risk governance on the island of Dordrecht, where the Dutch risk-based approach known as multilayer safety has been applied. Specifically, several steps have been taken to organize the area into compartments with different flood safety regimes. Hegger and colleagues analyse the different governance arrangements in place and conclude that such diversification will probably increase resilience to flood risk, be effective in terms of goal achievement and be endorsed by the actors involved.

According to the authors, comparative analyses in different countries are now needed to allow experts to draw lessons about the possibility of generalizing results. Although PAA has been applied to flood risk, they suggest it could be used to analyse governance in other contexts.