Researching flood risk governance in Europe

Flood risks in European countries are increasing due to urbanisation and the consequences of climate change. To address these increasing risks, several countries are attempting to diversify their portfolio of flood risk management strategies. Besides improvement of flood defences, the strategies of pro-active spatial planning; flood mitigation, flood preparation and recovery are prominently on the agenda. Governance and legal scholars have engaged with flood risk management, but only in a fragmented manner and without adopting a comparative approach, leaving crucial questions on how to govern towards resilient, efficient and legitimate flood risk governance underexposed. The book of which this chapter forms the introduction provides an overview of the main results of the EU FP7 project STAR-FLOOD (2012–2016). This was a multi-disciplinary project involving governance and legal scholars. It made a comparative analysis and evaluation of flood risk governance arrangements in Belgium, England, France, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden in order to derive design principles for appropriate and resilient flood risk governance. The chapter sets the scene by substantiating the relevance of adopting a governance and legal perspective on FRM. It furthermore explains the main features of STAR-FLOOD’s research approach in some detail, highlights connections with relevant existing literature and provides a reading guide to the forthcoming chapters.