Analysing and evaluating flood risk governance in the Netherlands: Drowning in safety?

This research provides a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of flood risk governance in the Netherlands. It includes: i) Identification of Flood Risk Strategies present in the Netherlands and their respective dominance; ii) Analysis of the embedding of these strategies in Flood Risk Governance Arrangement; iii) Examination of the factors driving change and stability in order to understand governance dynamics and provide insights into the potential opportunities or constraints to implementing future innovations; iv) Evaluation of the governance arrangement in terms of resilience, legitimacy and efficiency.

Key recommendations for flood risk governance in the Netherland from the report include:

• Keep a strong focus on flood defence, but also implement other strategies specially prevention, mitigation, and preparation/response.
• Strengthen the implementation of the flood prevention and mitigation strategies in spatial planning.
• Strengthen the implementation of the preparation/response strategy in emergency management.
• Increase awareness among citizens in order to strengthen their preparedness.
• The ability to recover via insurance systems can be taken into consideration.
• Avoid fragmentation of the Dutch FRM system.

The basis of this report is an extensive policy and legal analysis of key documents, over 40 interviews and two workshops with key actors in flood risk management. The research is conducted within the EU FP7-funded project "STAR-FLOOD". Analysis has been conducted at the national scale and three regional case studies, each selected to reveal insight into different aspects of flood risk governance.