Emmy Bergsma - From Flood Safety to Spatial Management: Expert-Policy Interactions in Dutch and US Flood Governance

This book series aims at providing a platform for developing an integrated perspective on major advances in the field of water governance. Contributions will build bridges across established fields of expertise, across disciplinary perspectives, across levels from global to local and across geographical regions. Topics to be covered include conceptual and methodological advances capturing the complexity of water governance systems, institutional settings, actor constellations, diagnostic approaches, and comparative studies of governance systems. The book series encompasses monographs, textbooks and edited, coordinated volumes addressing one theme from different perspectives. The book series will address mainly a wider scientific audience, but will also provide valuable knowledge to interested practitioners. The sustainable management of fresh water resources and the ecosystem services that they provide is one of the key challenges of the 21st century. Many water related problems can be attributed to governance failure at multiple levels of governance rather than to the resource base itself. At the same time our knowledge on water governance systems and conditions for success of water governance reform is still quite limited. The notion of water governance aims at capturing the complexity of processes that determine the delivery of water related services for societal needs and that provide the context within which water management operates. Water governance is a fast growing field of scholarly expertise which has largely developed over the past decade. The number of publications in peer reviewed journals has increased from less than 20 in the year 2000 to nearly 400 in the year 2013. The increasing popularity of the term in science and policy has not lead to conceptual convergence but rather to an increasing vagueness and competing interpretations of how the concept should be understood, studied, and analyzed; which disciplines are involved; and what methodological approaches are most suitable for the study and analysis of water governance. The time seems to be ripe for comprehensive synthesis and integration.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13400

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The research for this manuscript was carried out at the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam. It was made possible by the Stichting Agnosticisme and Meritocratie .

In the last decades, the costs of floods have risen. In 2017 alone, more than 1200 people were killed during monsoon floods in South Asia, hurricanes Harvey and Irma brought 200300 billion US dollar (USD) damage to the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean, and large parts of central Europe were hit by massive riverine flooding. 2017 is no exception. For years, floods have ranked on top of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reductions list of most disastrous natural hazards (UNISDR ). A key question that emerges from these rising (future) costs of flooding is who will pay for these costs and the protection measures to avert them? This question forms the starting point of this book.

This study is the result of a personal quest into an issue that has bothered me since the start of my studies in human geography: Who pays for natural distress? Human geography analyses the relationship between humans and their (social and natural) environment; my specialization, environmental geography, focuses on our relationship with nature specifically. This specialization looks at how we make use of our natural environment, and how we create the conditions that allow us to access natural areas, utilize their resources, and maximize their benefits. It also looks at the implications of these human interferences with nature. By shaping nature to our needs, we have exposed ourselves to its harms. We have not only contributed to environmental problems such as earthquakes, biodiversity loss, droughts, and floods but these problems now also present a threat to the environment we have become so dependent on (Goudie ). In the management of environmental problems, the short-term and often individual benefits gained by our use of nature have to be considered against the long-term and often collective risks created by this use. How to make such trade-offs is, in my view, one of the most pressing and relevant questions in environmental governance.