Flood resilience and legitimacy – an exploration of Dutch flood risk management

Abstract

Floods can be approached at a given location with two different concepts in mind: defending against floods or adapting to floods (Sauri-Pujol et al., 2001) (further, the option of mitigation exists, but this is a rather long-term and large-scale approach). First, resistance-based flood protection is the traditional approach to flood risk; second is resilience, which is linked with the concept of flood risk management. Flood protection usually requires dykes, technical flood protection measures, and strong water management institutions with technical skills; resilient flood risk management asks for comprehensive and integrative concepts, encompassing many stakeholders and asking for collaboration at various levels. The advantage of resistance-oriented flood protection is that it facilitates using protected land efficiently without the necessity of making compromises because of the flood risk. However, this approach has boundaries and constraints when flood risk increases, protection measures fail, or extreme floods occur. Thus, complementary resilient flood risk management is necessary, which comes with costs for adaptation and compromises for land use, but allows for coping much better with the management of increasing risk and extreme events because it reduces vulnerabilities.