Moving away from local-based flood risk policy in Austria.

Floodplain areas across the world have always played an attractive role for residential and non-residential developments. The alpine regions have a strong pressure to develop new residential and non-residential buildings in hazard areas due to lack of other areas suitable for development. Consequently, the number of elements at risk and vulnerability to flood hazards increased. In order to reduce the vulnerability, the focus of mitigation flood hazards was for decades on structural engineering measures with the problem of spatial misfits between the threat and management strategy. Since the late 1990s/early 2000s, Austrian policy makers have been trying to overcome this spatial misfit with the implementation of an inter-local co-operation approach with the use of so-called 'new spatial planning' (Heley, 2013) in the planning process. Therefore, the paper examines what the actors and stakeholders are doing in practice and how the concept of fuzziness helps. Although a partnership approach may be seen as a promising solution, in practice there are many limitations and barriers in establishing these collaborations and making them effective (especially in the long term). Rhetoric may not be matched by reality and a 'partnership' agenda may bring more problems (i.e. high transactions costs, high risk of failure, uncertainty in the long term) than it solves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]