Introducing Adaptive Flood Risk Management in England, New Zealand, and the Netherlands: The Impact of Administrative Traditions

Arwin Van Buuren,Karen Potter,Jeroen F Warner,Judy Lawrence

doi:10.1111/ropr.12300

Abstract

AbstractClimate change adaptation creates significant challenges for decision makers in the flood risk‐management 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.

Highlights

Climate change adaptation creates significant challenges for decision makers in the flood risk-management policy domain
By comparing the introduction of adaptive flood risk management approaches across England, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, we explore how administrative traditions shape the adoption and implementation of adaptive strategies and identify which aspects of administrative traditions enable or hinder these processes
In the Netherlands, multiple pilots are used to experiment with ideas of multilayered safety, building with nature, and spatial adaptation, but the question remains whether these pilots are powerful enough to result into durable change. It sounds quite obvious, we conclude that administrative traditions do matter when it comes to the adoption of adaptive flood risk management (FRM) in our three countries, because they permeate the decision space in which policy is prepared, the actor configuration and distribution of responsibilities and how planning is done, decisions made, and implemented

Summary

Introduction

Climate change adaptation creates significant challenges for decision makers in the flood risk-management policy domain. Climate change and its consequences are characterized by many uncertainties. The complexity of climate change and its consequences arises from impacts that can be nonlinear and dynamic, and from the manifold interactions between different social and natural systems and scales, compounding with economic and spatial developments and demographic trends that change over time and space. This brings challenges to policy making and implementation related to institutional “fit” (Young, 2002) which is affected by the design of regime governance and epistemic traditions, and their practice

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