Flood Risk Management in Europe: Similarities and Differences between the STAR-FLOOD consortium countries

This report has been compiled as part of the STAR-FLOOD project, a European FP7 project focused on
flood risk governance. The project investigates strategies for dealing with flood risks in 18 vulnerable
urban regions in six European countries: Belgium, The UK (more precisely: England and Scotland),
France, The Netherlands, Poland and Sweden.
The report highlights the main similarities and differences between the six STAR-FLOOD consortium
countries, complemented with some interesting examples from other European countries. Amongst
other things, the report discusses the Flood Risk Management Strategies and Flood Risk Governance
Arrangements that are in place. The report intends to contribute to an extended problem analysis of
flood risk governance in Europe. STAR-FLOOD researchers in each country wrote a text on the
situation in their country (included in the annex). Based on this input, eight salient themes have been
identified according to which the countries seem to differ:
i) The countries’ baseline situation in terms of their actual flood experiences (chapter 2);
ii) Designated competent authorities and the actual competences that actors have for
implementing Flood Risk Management Strategies (chapter 3);
iii) Resources for flood risk governance: the financing arrangements that are in place (chapter
4);
iv) The degree and ways in which integration between water management and spatial planning
is taking place (chapter 5);
v) The extent to which stakeholder involvement takes place and the ways in which it is done
(chapter 6);
vi) The substantive and procedural norms and goals that are in place (chapter 7);
vii) The way in which discourses on flood management have evolved in each of the consortium
countries and how this relates to discourses on flood management more generally (chapter
8).
viii) The Flood Risk Management Strategies that are actually in place (chapter 9);
The findings suggest mutual influences (but not necessarily causal relations) between experiences
with floods (item i), the institutional organisation of water governance (item ii-vii) and the types of
Flood Risk Management Strategies actually applied (item viii). Notwithstanding the differences,
similarities between The Netherlands, France, the UK and Belgium have been identified. All these
countries went through some similar stages from a dominant civil engineering paradigm, via a shift
towards ‘non-structural measures’ and a wish to accommodate water, towards an acknowledgement
of the need to take consequences of climate change into account. In Sweden, on the contrary, the
significance of floods has been relatively low until recently (but its importance is expected to increase
due to the expected consequences of climate change). On the other extreme, Poland is known to be
short on resources for dealing with flood risks.
Together with the findings of the other three reports produced within Work Package 1 of STARFLOOD,
this report will serve as input for the development of an assessment framework for flood risk
governance (WP2) and as a reference for the case study research (WP3). The report provides
interesting conclusions, assumptions and questions to be taken up. In particular, policymakers,
practitioners and the STAR-FLOOD consortium can derive the following lessons from this report:
 Every Flood Risk Management Strategy is not feasible everywhere. The report has identified
differences in the appropriateness of flood risk management strategies in specific contexts;
 Item i-vii above constitute an initial check list of potential factors explaining stability and
dynamics in flood risk governance;
 A detailed list of practical questions has been derived, which researchers studying flood risk
governance in the six STAR-FLOOD consortium countries are invited to consider.