Norms, structures, procedures and variety in risk-based governance: the case of flood management in Germany and England1

Risk-based governance is argued by many to hold out the promise of a more rational and efficient state, by making explicit the limitations of state interventions and focusing the finite resources on those targets where the probable damage is greatest. This paper, however, challenges the assumption that risk-based governance has the potential for universal and uniform application across developed countries by comparing contemporary flood management in Germany and England. On first inspection, flooding appears to be a paradigmatic case of ‘risk’ colonising European policy discourses with traditional ‘flood defence’ giving way to ‘flood risk management’ in the context of climate change, political and cost pressures on flood protection in the wake of recent disasters, and European-wide flood maps that publicly identify properties at risk. Drawing on indepth empirical research, however, this paper shows how the role, influence, and even definition of ‘risk’ is institutionally shaped within the institutional environments of the German and English flood management. In particular, the use and conceptualisations of risk in governance are variously promoted, filtered or constrained by the administrative structures, norms, and political and cultural expectations that are embedded within the flood management and the wider polities of each country. This paper examines the following questions: Is risk-based governance the same everywhere? If not, how does it vary? How can the variation be explained? The paper therefore critically engages with the scholarly debate about the dynamic rise of risk-based governance. Riskbased governance implies that governance resources (e.g. financial, regulatory, informational measures, price/economic incentives) are allocated on the basis of calculations of risk . Calculating risk normally means quantitatively assessing the probability of certain outcomes, for instance the potential economic losses from disasters. Increasingly, scholars have been making arguments about the ‘attractions of risk-based regulation’ ; the ‘risk colonisation’ of an increasing number of policy domains ; the rise of ‘risk management of everything’ and the pervasiveness of risk-based routines and practices of government in most areas of life . This scholarly literature echoes the wide endorsement of risk by policy-makers: The European Commission calls risk a ‘crucial’ component of public policy while the OECD reports favourably on the progress made by some of its member states towards adopting risk-based governance . In these public and scholarly debates, the underlying drivers of this adoption are of two kinds, namely that risk-based governance ensures a more efficient use of finite resources, as well as more accountable governance. In times of austerity and good governance, arguments about the universal rise of risk-based governance therefore seem to make good sense. Similar arguments can be made for the empirical case study of this paper, the management of flooding. Flood management has attracted substantial attention by policy-makers in European countries in recent years because of the dramatic increase in the number of floods causing significant economic damage since the 1990s , including such disasters as the Elbe/Danube 1 This paper will be presented at the 4 Biennial Conference of the ECPR Standing Group on Regulation & Governance at the University of Exeter, 27-29 June 2012. Please note that the title of the paper has been changed to the one in the Conference Programme. I would like to thank Henry Rothstein, David Demeritt and Sotiria Theodoropoulou for their useful comments. 2 Department of War Studies, King’s College London, Email: [email protected]. 3 The average number of ‘major floods’ per year between 1990 and 2005 increased by 241% on the years between 1950 and 1989 (Barredo, 2007). Barredo defines ‘major floods’ as events with casualties of more than 70 people and/or the direct damage is larger than 0.005% of the EU GDP in the year of the disaster. In relation to 2011 EU GDP, that would mean damage greater that 630 million EUR.