Toward more resilient food risk governance

Countries all over the world face increasing flood risks because of urbanization and the effects of climate change. In
Europe, flooding is the most common of all natural disasters and accounts for the largest number of casualties and highest amount of
economic damage. The current scientific debate on how urban agglomerations can be made more resilient to these flood risks includes
a discussion on how a diversification, coordination, and alignment of flood risk management strategies (FRMSs), including flood risk
prevention through proactive spatial planning, flood defense, flood risk mitigation, flood preparation, and flood recovery, can contribute
to flood resilience. Although effective implementation of FRMSs can be considered a necessary precondition for resilience, efficient
and legitimate flood risk governance can enhance this societal resilience to flooding. Governance and legal research has the potential
to provide crucial insights into the debate on how to improve resilience. Yet the social sciences have only looked into this issue in a
fragmented manner, often without a comparative scope. This special feature addresses this knowledge gap by focusing on the scope
and workings of FRMSs, but also on cross-cutting topics such as uncertainties, distributional effects, solidarity, knowledge management,
and citizen participation. The papers included in this feature are written by both policy analysts and legal scholars. The above-mentioned
issues are thus approached via a multidisciplinary perspective. All papers convincingly show that one-size-fits-all solutions for
appropriate and resilient flood risk governance arrangements do not exist. Governance arrangements should be tailored to the existing
physical, socio-cultural, and institutional context. This requires an open and transparent debate between scientists and practitioners
on the normative starting point of flood risk governance, a clear division of responsibilities, the establishment of connectivity between
actors, levels, and sectors through bridging mechanisms, and adequate knowledge infrastructures, both nationally and internationally