Compensating Flood Retention on Private Land in Austria: Towards Polycentric Governance in Flood Risk Management?

Abstract

Flood retention, in particular controlled flood retention, plays an increasingly prominent role in the portfolio of flood risk management strategies. Though a highly effective measure to reduce the risk of flooding for vulnerable areas, flood retention is land-intensive and infringes on landowners' property rights. Implementation efforts are thus often hampered by the lack of availability of land as well as by the growing demands of (agricultural) landowners for compensation of flood retention services. The proliferation of flood retention not only changes riparian land uses but also results in a shift of authority, power, and agency to lower levels of government as well as to non-governmental actors, including the private landowners who provide the land for flooding but also those who benefit from flood retention. By the example of a compensation scheme for the controlled flood retention in Altenmarkt, an alpine municipality in Austria, this paper explores these nascent forms of governance through the lens of polycentricity. Along five core propositions in polycentric theory, the paper evaluates the governance implications of flood retention compensation in Austria and discusses the possibilities and limitations of flood retention for enhancing landscape resilience in riparian areas.

The Role of Global Data Sets for Riverine Flood Risk Management at National Scales

“…Governance strategies to FRM vary, as countries prioritize certain approaches over others (Driessen et al., 2018). Governance strategies can be hierarchical, consisting of a traditional “top down” decision‐making structure (Alexander, Priest, & Mees, 2016); they can be decentralized, where policy decisions are made at the local level with a greater emphasis placed on stakeholder engagement (Driessen et al., 2012); they can be polycentric, where policy power is shared between different levels of government and nongovernment stakeholders (Garvey & Paavola, 2021; Loeschner et al., 2019); or they can be panarchy, which is an adaptive approach to governance that consists of a nested set of adaptive cycles (Alexander, Priest, & Mees, 2016; Gunderson & Holling, 2002), where certain conditions can trigger “bottom up” changes in the system (Garmestani & Benson, 2013).…”