Resilience is key to managing complex social-ecological systems and reducing vulnerability to uncertainty and unexpected change. Yet, flood risk management (FRM) has emerged largely from a culture of resistance. Scholarship on how ‘good governance’ can promote resilience to flooding has increased substantially over the past few decades. Thus, practical guidance for improving FRM to enhance resilience to floods should be available from recent scholarship; however, there has been no analysis of the focus of FRM resilience scholarship in terms of governance or the key gaps in knowledge to improve resilience to flooding. This paper examines current academic thought and trends on how flood management relates to flood resilience. Specifically:
• What has been the focus of scholarship on FRM governance and resilience? What are the dominant lines of inquiry? What are the key gaps in knowledge and understanding?
This Chapter is published in the Journal of Flood Risk Management, a leading international journal in the field of FRM (Impact factor: 2.483):
• Morrison, A., C. J. Westbrook, and B. F. Noble. 2017. A review of the flood risk management governance and resilience literature. Journal of Flood Risk Management 11(3): 291-304. doi:10.1111/jfr3.12315.
This Chapter demonstrates that:
• There is a divide in FRM scholarship between the physical and social sciences, even when addressing resilience.
• FRM governance research is siloed from practice and policy, limiting the transfer of knowledge between scholars and practitioners.
4 The research paper that this chapter is based on was accepted for publication in late 2016. It is acknowledged that more literature relating to the subject matter has been published since this time that is not captured here. More recent literature is captured in the introduction to this dissertation (Chapter 1).
• Most research addressing tools for FRM are focused on physical modelling, with limited attention to social dimensions.
• Most scholarship focused on tools are within the scope of specific disciplines, with limited attention to frameworks for integration.
• There is limited, applied research on governance frameworks and how to organize institutions, people, and information for building flood resilient societies.
Overall, this Chapter shows that notwithstanding an increase in FRM governance and resilience research, much of it is carried out in silos, which seems contradictory to the concepts of resilience and the strategic and adaptive approaches often espoused. There is no clear FRM research agenda, and what constitutes resilience - and more specifically what it looks like in FRM practice - is not clearly defined. A more tightly coupled FRM research-for-policy agenda is required to better direct both research and advances in policy and practice.
2.2 Introduction
Globally, floods are responsible for considerable and increasing economic and social losses (Kundzewicz et al., 2014). In Canada, for example, floods are happening more frequently and are more widespread under a rapidly changing climate (Nastev and Todorov, 2013; Whitfield, 2012).
Between 1990 and 2015, 141 flood disasters were recorded in Canada, which were responsible for killing 21 people, evacuation 215,207 people, and costing an estimated CAD $7.9 billion in damages (CDD, Public Safety Canada, 2018). Based on spending in the previous decade, the Canadian Government reports that it expects to pay out, on average, CAD $673 million per year over the next five years in disaster assistance funds (OPBO, 2016). In the United Kingdom, annual flood damage is estimated at £1.1 billion and expected to rise to as much as £27 billion by 2080 under a worst case climate change scenario, with no additional adaptation measures (Foresight, 2004); the maintenance of existing levels of flood defence will require increases in spending of over £1 billion annually (Bennett and Hartwell-Naguib, 2014). In Australia, between December 2010 and January 2011, Western Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland experienced widespread flooding that resulted in 37 lives lost and a total cost of over AUD $30 billion to the Australian economy (Garrett, 2011). The increasing frequency and expense of flood disasters like these suggests that becoming more resilient to flooding is likely to be a social and economic priority for many nations.
Historically, efforts to address flood risk have centred on flood resistance rather than resilience (Shrubsole, 2013). The standard response to flood risk management (FRM) amongst developed nations has often been the adoption of resistance-based strategies (Zevenbergen and Gersonius, 2007), meaning attempting to control flood threats with infrastructure and controlling behaviour with laws and regulations (Holling and Meffe, 1996). The aim of resistance-based strategies is to remove, in so far as possible, the threat of extreme variations and to minimise the potential for adverse impacts to society. Although this approach can provide substantial protection against environmental threats such as floods, including minimizing the costs associated with design floods (see Meyer et al., 2012), it does not cope well with uncertainty. A sole focus on resistance to flooding can be costly in terms of human life, property and infrastructure, particularly in those cases when infrastructure or regulatory controls fail to provide adequate protection against
surprise events (Dawson et al., 2011; European Union, 2007; FDRP, 1975; Holling and Meffe, 1996; Folke et al., 2002; Park et al., 2013).
Adaptive approaches, embracing uncertainty, and seeking to accommodate rather than control environmental systems, offer a complementary response to resistance-based FRM.
Substantial academic literature on adaptively managing dynamic systems has been available since at least the 1950s (Walters and Hillborn, 1978). Adaptive approaches focus on mitigating, coping with, and recovering from expected and unexpected change through a diverse range of policy and management options. A significant component of adaptation is continuous learning from, and embracing, changing system conditions (Akamani and Wilson, 2011; van Wesenbeek et al., 2014;
Zhou et al., 2012). The desire to apply adaptive approaches to environmental management has gained prominence since the late 1970s (e.g. Folke et al., 2002; Grayson et al., 1994; Gunderson, 1999; Holling, 1978; Walters and Hillborn, 1978) and is gradually being adopted into policy and practice (Noble, 2015a).
Flood risk management has also adopted the language of adaptation. The Flood Damage Reduction Program in Canada, for example, acknowledged decades ago the need to move away from sole reliance on large-scale defensive flood control structures towards more diverse and adaptive approaches (FDRP, 1975). More recently, the European Union encoded in law the need for its member states to embrace a more adaptive view of FRM, with the introduction of the 2007 EU Flood Directive (European Union, 2007) identifying the need for not only flood defence and preparedness, but also the capacity to cope with and adapt to flood events. The emergence of more adaptive approaches to FRM does not suggest that traditional, resistance-based approaches are without merit. Rather, improving resilience to the adverse impacts of flood events, and building the capacity to adapt to changing flood conditions, requires a combination of both resistance- and adaptive-based approaches (Schelfaut et al., 2011).
There has emerged, particularly in the past two decades, increased attention on FRM governance and how ‘good governance’ can promote resilience to environmental change (e.g.
Borba et al., 2016; Buckland and Rahman, 1999; Carter et al., 2009; Cutter et al., 2000; Dwyer et al., 1997; Levy et al., 2007; Rosner et al., 2014; Smits et al., 2006). At the heart of this scholarship is the notion that flood resilience sometimes means coping with or adapting to flood events and
implementing a diverse range of FRM strategies, including resistance-based strategies (Klijn et al., 2008; Schelfaut et al., 2011). This means that increasing flood resilience requires the combination of two, often-contrasting, paradigms of flood resistance and flood adaptation (Park et al., 2013).
The differences between these two paradigms represent different theoretical constructs, assumptions, and understandings of the role disturbance plays in integrative human and natural systems, and thus reflect substantially different perspectives on FRM. Multi-disciplinary research initiatives, especially in Europe (e.g., FLOODsite, Flood Risk Management Research Consortium, STARFlood and others) demonstrate a concerted effort to develop resilient approaches to FRM, however, in many cases transitioning to a more diverse set of strategies, policies and actions is constrained by governance institutions that are inherently resistant to change (Pahl-Wostl and Knieper, 2014; Penning-Roswell and Johnson, 2015).
Guidance for improving FRM policy and management to enhance resilience to floods should be available from the scholarly literature. However, there has been no investigation of the state of FRM adaptation and resilience research as it relates to governance, nor of the key gaps in knowledge that need to be addressed to advance resilience to flooding. The purpose of this paper is thus to examine current academic thought and trends on how flood management relates to flood resilience. We do so based on the argument that understanding how the scholarly community relates resilience in FRM research to governance, policy, and actions will help in identifying and prioritizing research needs to enable FRM policy and process improvements. We do this by examining how the scholarly, peer reviewed journal literature has approached the subject of FRM governance and resilience to flooding, the dominant lines of inquiry, and the gaps in knowledge and understanding.