ABSTRACT. Across Europe, citizens are increasingly expected to participate in the implementation of flood risk management (FRM), by engaging in voluntary-based activities to enhance preparedness, implementing property-level measures, and so forth. Although citizen participation in FRM decision making is widely addressed in academic literature, citizens' involvement in the delivery of FRM measures is comparatively understudied. Drawing from public administration literature, we adopted the notion of "coproduction" as an analytical framework for studying the interaction between citizens and public authorities, from the decision-making process through to the implementation of FRM in practice. We considered to what extent coproduction is evident in selected European Union (EU) member states, drawing from research conducted within the EU project STAR-FLOOD (Strengthening and Redesigning European Flood Risk Practices towards Appropriate and Resilient Flood Risk Governance Arrangements). On the basis of a cross-country comparison between Flanders (Belgium), England (United Kingdom), France, the Netherlands, and Poland, we have highlighted the varied forms of coproduction and reflected on how these have been established within divergent settings. Coproduction is most prominent in discourse and practice in England and is emergent in France and Flanders. By contrast, FRM in the Netherlands and Poland remains almost exclusively reliant on governmental protection measures and thereby consultation-based forms of coproduction. Analysis revealed how these actions are motivated by different underlying rationales, which in turn shape the type of approaches and degree of institutionalization of coproduction. In the Netherlands, coproduction is primarily encouraged to increase societal resilience, whereas public authorities in the other countries also use it to improve cost-efficiency and redistribute responsibilities to its beneficiaries.

Citizens' initiatives for climate action are actively encouraged by governments to enhance the resilience of communities to climate change. This increased responsibilisation of citizens has implications for the roles of governments. The degree of government involvement does not necessarily decline, but government roles may need to shift: from a regulating and steering government towards a more collaborative and responsive government that enables and facilitates community initiatives that are self-governed by citizens. However, we lack a conceptual understanding of such new government roles, as well as empirical insights into how local governments participate in citizens' initiatives and how they take up such new roles.In this paper, a "ladder of government participation" is introduced, which is used to explore the roles of local governments in citizens' initiatives for climate change adaptation in the Netherlands. The results show that local governments are slowly but gradually shifting towards more networking, stimulating, and facilitating roles. Key concerns of local practitioners are (a) a lack of flexibility and support of their own municipal organisation to facilitate citizens' initiatives, (b) uncertainty about the continuity of citizens' initiatives over time, and (c) a potential increase of inequity among citizen groups resulting from facilitating citizens' initiatives. An important finding is that the roles of local governments tend to be flexible, in that they can move from one role to the other over time for one and the same citizens' initiative depending on its stage of development, as well as take up several roles simultaneously for different citizens' initiatives.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Description of the researchThis research entailed an international comparative case study on adaptive flood risk governance arrangements for urban waterfront regeneration projects. These projects apply flood risk strategies that aim to reduce the impacts of a flood in addition to preventing the occurrence of a flood so as to improve the resilience to climate change. Applying multiple flood risk strategies fits with the new strategy of "Multi-layered Safety" which was introduced in 2009 by the Dutch government.

Calls to strengthen flood risk governance are echoed across Europe amidst a growing consensus that floods will increase in the future. Accompanying the pursuit of societal resilience, other normative agendas relating legitimacy (e.g. accountability and public participation), and resource efficiency, have become attached to discussions concerning flood risk governance. Whilst these represent goals against which 'success' is socially and politically judged, lacking from the literature is a coherent framework to operationalise these concepts and evaluate the degree to which these are achieved. Drawing from crossdisciplinary and cross-country research conducted within the EU project STAR-FLOOD, this paper presents a framework for evaluating the extent to which flood risk governance arrangements support societal resilience, and demonstrate efficiency and legitimacy. Through empirical research in England, this paper critically reflects on the value of this approach in terms of identifying entry points to strengthen governance in the pursuit of these goals.

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