Flood resilience and legitimacy: an exploration of Dutch flood risk management

This contribution discusses the tensions of legitimacy in flood risk management resulting from the claim for more flood resilience. Interviews with stakeholders all over the Netherlands confirmed a change in the way water management and the management of floods in particular has been gradually changing over the past decades: There is a shift from a predominantly interest- and representation-based perspective on legitimation towards a more inclusive, horizontal, bottom-up, interactive perspective that takes multiple stakeholders and multiple issues into account (e.g., a new perspective of governance regarding the management of floods). In other words, an evolvement from resistance-based flood protection to a more resilient flood risk management paradigm, which challenges the common way of legitimization. Input and output legitimacy are complemented by an extra component of throughput-legitimacy.