Coproducing flood risk management through citizen involvement: insights from cross-country comparison in Europe

Across Europe, citizens are increasingly expected to participate in the implementation of flood risk management (FRM), by engaging in voluntary-based activities to enhance preparedness, implementing property-level measures, etc. While citizen participation in FRM decision-making is widely addressed in academic literature, citizens' involvement in the delivery of FRM measures is comparatively understudied. Drawing from public administration literature, this paper adopts the notion of 'co-production' as an analytical framework for studying the interaction between citizens and public authorities, from the decision making process through to the implementation of FRM in practice. The paper considers to what extent co-production is evident in selected EU Member States, drawing from research conducted within the EU project 'STAR-FLOOD'. On the basis of a cross-country comparison between Flanders (Belgium), England (UK), France, the Netherlands and Poland, this research highlights the varied forms of co-production and reflects on how these have been established within divergent settings. Co-production is most outspoken in discourse and practice in England, and is emergent in France and Flanders. By contrast, FRM in the Netherlands and Poland remains almost exclusively reliant on governmental protection measures and thereby consultation-based forms of co-production. Analysis reveals how these actions are motivated by different underlying rationales, which in turn shape the type of approaches and degree of institutionalization of co-production. In the Netherlands, co-production is primarily encouraged to increase societal resilience, while public authorities in the other countries use it as well to improve cost-efficiency and redistribute responsibilities to its beneficiaries.

Copyright © 2016 by the author(s). Published under license by The Resilience Alliance.

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