Expectations, disappointments, and individual responses: Imbalances in multilevel flood risk governance revealed by public survey

The recent paradigm shift towards multilevel flood risk governance has raised discussions about the potential of different entities to undertake specific flood risk management (FRM) measures and about the effects of their efforts on other governance levels. This paper uses the results of a flood perception survey among individuals in two flood‐prone Czech municipalities to reveal the discrepancies between the expectations of responsibility‐sharing and the actual willingness for individual flood risk reduction. The findings point out the following insights:

• There is a general expectation that governmental bodies will initiate multilevel FRM, but the confidence in the positive effect of the completed FRM measures is rather low, which may finally support some individual mitigation measures.
• The expressed expectations from individual actors taking part on FRM as well as confidence in FRM measures and individual mitigation measures are locally diversified by perceived flood susceptibility and severity, recent flood experience and perceived scale of the FRM efforts and catchment complexity.