Flood risk management has become more significant in the face of rapid urban development and the climate change. Many governments and the decision makers have recognized the requirement of resilient flood management policies and strategies for sustainable urban development. During the recent decades, various conceptual framework of flood risk assessment and management emerged and they in turn questioned the characterization of resilience in flood risk management. More recently, research on flood risk management and spatial planning have demonstrated a common discussion platform appreciating the concept of flood resilience in policy and strategy making. However, assessment and operationalization of flood resilience is often questionable due to its conceptual vagueness. The present work is a review of the plurality views of flood resilience. Resilience thinking has moved the focus of flood risk assessment towards vulnerability. Flood resilience embeds the incorporation of spatially distributed land use policies and regulations which are a must for the management of flood vulnerability. Spatial planning reflecting flood resilience becomes vital when managing the uncertainty incorporated with flood risk management. However, the operationalization and legitimacy of the importance of the combined role of spatial planning and flood risk management with stakeholder acceptance still remains implicit and weak.

The occurrence of flood disasters has become a vicious problem in many urban regions. Operationalization of flood resilience has become a significant concern with the increase of urban development and climate change. The objective of this paper is at first to analyze how flood resilience has been framed over the past period of time. Second, this paper has focused to identify the practical difficulties related to the available flood risk assessment and management frameworks for operationalization of flood resilience. The results show that the flood risk and resilience has been framed differently throughout the time, in diverse perspectives but still remains as contested concepts. Evolutionary resilience has been reframed the flood risk management system as an integrated and adaptive system with the recognition of the uncertainties due to the dynamics of socio-spatial interdependencies of flood risk. Therefore, the integration and the adaptive capacity of spatial planning has become a crucial aspect for operationalizing flood resilience which is governed through the knowledge base of the dominant discourses of stakeholders and the way of power and the resource exercised in the context.

Uncertainty is inherent to the decision-making process of flood risk management, and hence uncertainty management has been identified as crucial in the decision-making process. Flood management has been transformed towards flood risk management highlighting the stakeholder integration and adaptation to extreme flood events. Therefore, the development of multifunctional land uses over floodplains considering the multiple objectives of the stakeholders have become a key to manage uncertainty incorporated with flood risk management. Integration of multiple stakeholders in the decision-making process has been a challenging task. Therefore, spatial planning as a collaborative planning tool has become very important to manage flood risk. Operationalization of flood risk management is mainly governed by the characteristics of the planning processes and it is also coined with the governance context of each locality. However, the importance of the role of spatial planning in flood risk management is still hidden. Further, there is no common framework developed for structuring the complexity of the planning process. Therefore, this research attempts to develop a framework for the operationalization of flood risk management. The conceptual framework was developed based on a comprehensive literature review. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been used and integrated with the Delphi technique to identify and calibrate the criteria and the sub-criteria of the framework. The developed framework has been validated with a case study. This research has been concluded that sixteen characteristics of the decision-making process contribute to the operationalization of flood risk management.

Salt water intrusion (SWI) and coastal salinity are major causes for abandoning the paddy lands in Sri Lanka. More than 80% of paddy lands in left bank of Bentota River basin have been progressively abandoned due to contrasting degrees of saltwater intrusion by intimidating for agriculture, fishery, tourism and ground water in the area. This study was conducted applying the toolkit for the Indicators of Resilience in Socio-ecological Production Landscapes and Seascapes (SEPLS, 2014) through stakeholder perception based approach. Indictor scores and trend analysis indicate that there is a negative trend in resilience capacity of Bentota landscape in terms of abandoning the paddy lands. Several issues in contradiction of the utilization of abandoned paddy lands and the location specific land management strategies for utilizing abandoned paddy lands were identified by consulting prospective stakeholders of the area for enhancing community resilience without undermining their eco-social basis. New technological innovations as outcome of recent research and development initiatives can be introduced and promoted among the stakeholders in the area who would be the pillars for regaining the successive agriculture in Bentota area by enhancing the land productivity of abandoned paddy lands towards the sustainable land management.

No abstract