Researching Flood Risk Governance in Europe: background theories

This report, together with the report "Researching Flood Risk Governance in Europe: a framework and methodology for assessing Flood Risk Governance" forms the main deliverable for the Second Work Package of the EU 7th Framework Project STAR-FLOOD. Whereas the framework and methodology report mainly serves to provide guidance for researchers, the current report provides further theoretical background thereby grounding the framework in the literature. It also provides space for some further elaboration on issues that could only be touched upon in the guidance report. Both reports are expected to be equally important, but probably in different stages of the empirical research. The report is structured according to the three main analytical steps that have been distinguished within STAR-FLOOD, being those of analysing, explaining and evaluating Flood Risk Governance in Europe. To each of these analytical steps one chapter is devoted. Chapter 2 presents an extract of two texts on the Policy Arrangements Approach, the theoretical backbone of STAR-FLOOD’s analytical framework. The first text is an extract of a book chapter by Duncan Liefferink entitled ‘The dynamics of policy arrangements: turning round the tetrahedron’. The second text is an extract from: Wiering M, Arts, B 2006, Discursive shifts in Dutch river management: ‘deep’ institutional change or adaptation strategy? In: Hydrobiologia, vol. 565, pp. 327- 338. Both texts together provide an overview of the four dimensions of the Policy Arrangements Approach – Actors, Discourses, Rules, Resources, examples of how they can be operationalised, also with regard to water management issues, and some reflection on how the four dimensions can be brought together into a characterisation of Policy Arrangements as a whole. Chapter 3 provides an overview of background theories related to STAR-FLOOD’s explanatory framework. The chapter first discusses the main features of some prominent explanatory theories from the policy sciences literature, including the Multiple Streams Framework, Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, and the Advocacy Coalitions Framework as well as publications closely related to or critically reflecting upon the frameworks. The chapter then introduces the Multi-Level Perspective from Transitions Theory and discusses some syntheses between all aforementioned explanatory frameworks. Subsequently, some attention is devoted to a specific issue of relevance for efforts at explaining policy change, that is, the relationship between social structures and the purposeful actions of agents involved in Flood Risk Governance. The chapter goes on by discussing some of the literature on change agency and policy entrepreneurship. The last part of the chapter is devoted to reflections on the relationship between explanations by policy analysts and legal scholars; the relevance of natural law and positive law studies for explaining stability and dynamics in Flood Risk Governance; and specific explanations for stability and dynamics in legal frameworks. Chapter 4, finally, provides further background to the evaluation framework. The chapter starts off with a general reflection on evaluating governance, including an elaboration of previous experiences with evaluating governance. Subsequently, the literature on each one of STAR-FLOOD’s evaluation criteria is discussed in some detail: resilience, appropriateness, legitimacy, efficiency and effectiveness. The chapter then reflects on how the sub-criteria of legitimacy, efficiency and effectiveness could be combined into the meta-criterion of appropriateness. The chapter concludes with a discussion on operational challenges for evaluation and a summary of the evaluation framework as a whole