New Recommendations for a Proactive Flood Policy in India

As India grapples with devastating monsoon floods, a new review supports greater investment in nonstructural solutions.

Blurring the shoreline: De- and re-infrastructuring and the changing colors of European flood policy

This paper provides a genealogy of the emergence of a common EU flood policy, including the scope and direction of this policy. Noticing how EU policy proposes green infrastructure (associated with using nature as a buffer zone in managing floods) as an alternative to grey infrastructure (implying fixed installations of concrete and cement), this paper adopts the theoretical lens of the so-called infrastructural turn, which advocates a relational investigation of infrastructure. By engaging this approach, the paper shows how flood infrastructure can contain very different compositions of (unruly) water and (settled) land. A narrative of a historically strong focus on guarding society from the powerful forces of nature through a fixed line of defense is increasingly giving way to more muddy states—quite literally—where society is expected to learn to live with flooding and show ecological consideration. To capture the EU’s, and especially the European Commission’s efforts to establish a pan-European flood infrastructure that accommodates this turn, the concepts of de- and re-infrastructuring are developed. These concepts act as heuristic devices to capture how policy performs some combinations between water and land as constituting an attractive and functional flood infrastructure, but constitutes other infrastructural relations of the aquatic and the terrestrial as undesirable and, hence, as malfunctioning. This performative act of distinguishing between what constitutes “good and proper” versus “bad and undesirable” infrastructure is referred to as a politics of infrastructure.

Conflict on the Red River: Applying the institutional collective action framework to regional flood policy

In reaction to major flooding, local governments in Minnesota and North Dakota formed a cooperative network to construct a $1.2 billion flood diversion along the Red River of the North. Threatened by this diversion, a second set of governments formed their own network in opposition to flood policy. This study uses propositions derived from the Institutional Collective Action framework to examine formal contracts at the core of these cooperative networks, as well as the circumstances under which the contracts were negotiated. It considers the ability of the framework to understand interlocal cooperation where regional consensus is nonexistent. The study finds that the two sets of governments faced very different transaction costs, resulting in contrasting approaches to governance.

The framing of two major flood episodes in the Irish print news media: Implications for societal adaptation to living with flood risk

Societal adaptation to flooding is a critical component of contemporary flood policy. Using content analysis, this article identifies how two major flooding episodes (2009 and 2014) are framed in the Irish broadsheet news media. The article considers the extent to which these frames reflect shifts in contemporary flood policy away from protection towards risk management, and the possible implications for adaptation to living with flood risk. Frames help us make sense of the social world, and within the media, framing is an essential tool for communication. Five frames were identified: flood resistance and structural defences, politicisation of flood risk, citizen as risk manager, citizen as victim and emerging trade-offs. These frames suggest that public debates on flood management do not fully reflect shifts in contemporary flood policy, with negative implications for the direction of societal adaptation. Greater discussion is required on the influence of the media on achieving policy objectives.