Rational adaptation to increasing flood risk? Institutional drivers of and barriers to risk-based flood management in Germany and Britain

Introduction How do developed societies adapt to the increasing flooding? Which role do instruments associated with the concept of risk play in this adaptation? In which ways does the role of risk instruments in flood management vary between countries? How can the nature of and variation in flood regimes in different countries be explained? Over the last two decades, questions about how societies in Europe deal with flooding have attracted increasing public and political attention. The European Commission has counted more than 100 severe flood events for the period between 1998 and 2004 in Europe. As flooding is associated with (extreme) weather events and climatic processes, it is expected to become an even greater problem in the future. The experience and prospect of a more frequent occurrence of severe flood events has challenged notions of engineered control and safety that dominated flood management in the 20 century. Given the limitations of flood defences, recently emerging programmes and regulations concerning flooding looked beyond the management of water within their natural confines, including the management of land and financial damages. As safety can no longer be taken for granted, efforts are made to anticipate the consequences of future flood events and undertake interventions in accordance to the anticipated consequences. Risk – conventionally defined as the product of probability and consequences of potential, harmful events – promises to “bring the future into the present and make it calculable” (Rose 2002:214) and therefore offers “an incisive and compelling approach to decision-making” (Stirling 2003:33) in relation to future disasters. Based on quantitative risk assessments, it is possible to undertake interventions and allocate resources in a targeted, proportionate, and objective manner (Jones 1996; EA 2005). Given this ‘rational’ appeal of risk instruments and risk-based flood management, instruments associated with risk can be expected to increasingly inform anticipatory measures concerning flooding, especially in advanced industrialised societies with substantial analytical capacities. This expectation is vindicated by the recent EU Directive on the assessment and management of flood risk, promoting the use of risk assessment instruments as a basis for management decision (EC 2007). However, as this paper will demonstrate for the cases of Britain and Germany, the use of risk instruments varies between countries and across different dimensions of the emerging flood management regimes. This paper argues that variation in institutional context can explain the variation in the degree to which flood management is being adopted by actors responsible for flood management. More specifically, following arguments of Moran, Power and others (Power 1997; Hood 1999; Moran 2003), the patterns of adoption in Britain can best be understood in the context of the rise of the unique British regulatory state, characterised by an increasingly formalised, auditable style of regulation. Germany’s pattern of a limited adoption of risk-based flood management reflects the incompatibility of risk