From ‘Flood Defence’ to ‘Flood Risk Management’: Exploring Governance, Responsibility, and Blame

Abstract

Introduction For the UK, and particularly England, a shift in approach to flood governance has been gaining momentum since the early 1990s, broadly marked by a move from`flood defence' to`flood risk management' (FRM). At a general level, notions of controlling and defending against floods have given way to discourses which suggest we should make space for water' (DEFRA, 2005). This entails greater emphasis on soft engineering approaches and more strategies that work with natural processes, land-use planning, and flood abatement techniques such as reforestation (DEFRA, 2005; Tunstall, et al, 2004). In this emergent context, delivery of government policy is to be achieved through guiding the conduct of citizens, private enterprise, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), and other governance agencies at arms length from central government [eg the Environment Agency (EA)]. These contemporary changes in flood policy are by now well documented and have been subject to prior research and discussion (Johnson and Priest, 2008; Tunstall et al, 2004). While previous analyses have provided important insights into the processes of change in English FRM, we develop an interpretation of these processes of change in terms of deeper shifts in political rationalities (see also Pidgeon and Butler, 2009). Some of the newly advocated approaches to the structural management of flood risk can be seen as having been developed in response to concerns about sustainability, but this is not necessarily true of modes of delivery (although these are not easily separated out). Instead, the changing approach to the delivery of government objectives, in particular through noncoercive guidance of citizen and organisational conduct, can be seen as correspondent with a wider set of shifts in political governmentality that some have termed`advanced liberal' (Rose, 1996). Rose designates advanced liberal democracies, such as the UK, as seeking particular forms of rule or techniques of government:

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