Strategies for integrating water management and spatial planning: Organising for spatial quality in the Dutch “Room for the River” program

Abstract

In response to extreme flood events and an increasing awareness that traditional flood control measures alone are inadequate to deal with growing flood risks, spatial flood risk management strategies have been introduced. These strategies do not only aim to reduce the probability and consequences of floods, they also aim to improve local and regional spatial qualities. To date, however, research has been largely ignorant as to how spatial quality, as part of spatial flood risk management strategies, can be successfully achieved in practice. Therefore, this research aims to illuminate how spatial quality is achieved in planning practice. This is done by evaluating the configurations of policy instruments that have been applied in the Dutch Room for the River policy program to successfully achieve spatial quality. This policy program is well known for its dual objective of accommodating higher flood levels as well as improving the spatial quality of the riverine areas. Based on a qualitative comparative analysis, we identified three successful configurations of policy instruments. These constitute three distinct management strategies: the “program‐as‐guardian”, the “project‐as‐driver,” and “going all‐in” strategies. These strategies provide important leads in furthering the development and implementation of spatial flood risk management, both in the Netherlands and abroad.

Distributing Responsibilities for Climate Adaptation: Examples from the Water Domain

“…With spatial planning getting a more prominent position in flood risk management, flood risk management measures are increasingly considered in coherence with other land use functions, such as housing, recreation, transport, nature conservation, and cultural heritage [70]. While this may improve the local and regional spatial qualities [71]-and thereby also provide some benefits to the landowner-it does not automatically take away the experienced burden for the landowner.…”

Climate adaptation, urban regeneration and brownfield reclamation: a literature review on landscape quality in large-scale transformation projects

“…The national and local governments negotiated to resolve this conflict and empowered the local government to take the lead in the transformation (Heeres et al, 2017), supported by the provincial government (Winnubst, 2011). Next to flood risk management, landscape quality was a second objective of the programme, supported by nationwide descriptions of landscape characteristics (Busscher et al, 2018). The national government coordinated the Room for the River programme, with strict constraints on the required hydrological effects for each individual project (Klijn et al, 2013).…”

Simulating a Watershed-Scale Strategy to Mitigate Drought, Flooding, and Sediment Transport in Drylands

“…The goal is typically to control flooding through restricting area for river flow, such as using levees to protect floodplains under use. These spatial restrictions, however, decrease the buffering capacity of flooding processes and the overall system resiliency, which increases our vulnerability to catastrophic failures [17,19,20]. As increased flooding exposes these vulnerabilities, calls are emerging for process approaches on watershed scales, often termed eco-engineering approaches or nature based solutions [21,22], to adapt the socio-natural systems to flooding processes within the flood control disciplines [23].…”