Rescaling in flood risk governance – new spatial and institutional arrangements and structures

Flood governance and policy in Europe are changing: the role of the state and individual responsibility for risk management are now key contemporary issues in flood policy. The new policy agenda has been implemented to enhance the responsibilities of local authorities in flood risk management and reduce the controlling role of central national governments. The new strategies place the lead responsibility on local organisations to determine local strategies to manage local risks. This thesis examines the new role of these local authorities and organisations in flood risk management as well as how the nature of partnerships are established and operate, focusing especially on the main barriers and challenges. In principle, local authorities should be able to lead partnerships with local stakeholders to ensure effective local flood risk management. However, with current pressures on local authorities to reduce spending and a parallel reduction in the central state’s resources, partnership has been seen as a possibility to both increase the value of budgets available.
The central aspects of this thesis are to investigate and to explore the influence of new scales on the interaction and performance of the different actors and their relationships; particularly with regard to power, processes and scaled networks.The research was carried out through a series of semi-structured interviews with both regional and local stakeholders in Austria and England. It demonstrates not only the importance of network connections between actors at the same scale, but refers also to the networks between actors and stakeholders at different scales, especially between local and national level. Local engagement strongly depends on social capacities, such as knowledge, motivation/self-interest, economics, networks, organisation and procedural capacity.