Towards evaluation criteria in participatory flood risk management

Flood risk consists of complex and dynamic problems, whose management calls for innovative ways of engaging with a wide range of local stakeholders, many of whom lack the technical expertise to engage with traditional flood risk management practices. Participatory approaches offer potential for involving these stakeholders in decision-making, yet limited advice is available to users in choosing which techniques to employ and what they might expect them to deliver. Assessing the effectiveness of participatory approaches in local flood risk management is a critical step towards better understanding how community resilience is built. This paper presents a framework for evaluating participatory approaches to flood risk management that covers four evaluation elements (context, process, substantive and social outcomes). Practical success criteria are provided for evaluation, with references indicating where further advice and guidance can be sought. Criteria are tailored to the requirements of flood risk management, and aim to be sufficiently flexible for the framework to be easily transferable.

Published version: © 2018 The Authors. Journal of Flood Risk Management published by Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Final accepted version: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Maskrey SA, Priest S, Mount NJ. Towards evaluation criteria in participatory flood risk management. J Flood Risk Management. 2018;e12462., which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/jfr3.12462. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.