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In 2015 Henk Ovink was appointed as the first Special Envoy for International Water Affairs in the Netherlands. It was an entirely new position with global outreach in the Dutch policy landscape. Ovink, who is also called 'the ambassador for the Dutch water sector' describes his role as a 'connector'. He travels to vulnerable places around the globe to connect foreign stakeholders to Dutch governments, businesses and research organizations, helping with Dutch expertise on water management where needed and desired. Among others, the governments of the United States, South Africa, Myanmar, Vietnam, and India have asked for Henk Ovink's advice in organizing policy processes, usually in relation to a recent water-related crisis. Prior to his position as a Water Envoy, Ovink was part of President Obama's Rebuilding Task Force in the United States of America after hurricane Sandy had severely damaged the New York region.

Coping with the growing impacts of flooding in EU countries, a paradigm shift in flood management can be observed, moving from safety-based towards riskbased approaches and holistic perspectives. Flood resilience is a common denominator of most of the approaches. In this article, we present the 'Flood Resilience Rose' (FRR), a management tool to promote harmonised action towards flood resilience in European regions and beyond. The FRR is a result of a two-step process. First, based on scientific concepts as well as analysis of relevant policy documents, we identified three 'levels of operation'. The first level refers to the EU Floods Directive and an extended multi-layer safety approach, comprising the four different layers of protection, prevention, preparedness and recovery, and related measures to be taken. This level is not independent but depends both on the institutional (second level) and the wider (third level) context. Second, we used surveys, semi-structured interviews and group discussions during workshops with experts from Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom to validate the definitions and the FRR's practical relevance. The presented FRR is thus the result of rigorous theoretical and practical consideration and provides a tool capable to strengthen flood risk management practice.

Resilience is held as a promising concept to produce a paradigm shift from traditional flood control to an integration of flood risk management and spatial planning. Central ideas to the resilience narrative are that 'nothing is certain except uncertainty itself' and 'adaptability' is key to 'governing the unknown'. However, this terminology is far from clear, yet increasingly used, which raises the question how it is made sense of in practice. To answer this question, we examine two long-term flood risk management strategies in the London and Rotterdam region with a policy framing perspective (i.e. the English Thames Estuary 2100 Plan and the Dutch Delta Programme). In both strategies, uncertainties are a key concern, leading to adaptive strategic plans. Reconstructing the framing processes shows that the English adopted a 'scientific pragmatism' frame and the Dutch a 'joint fact-finding' frame. While this led to different governance approaches, there are also striking parallels. Both cases use established methods such as scenario planning and monitoring to 'manage' uncertainties. Similarly to previous turns in flood risk management, the resilience narrative seems to be accommodated in a technical-rational way, resulting in policy strategies that are maintaining the status quo rather than bringing about a paradigm shift.

In the past decades, the term 'resilience' has quickly gained currency in academia (including social, political and spatial sciences) as well as in practice. Nowadays, it is widely promoted as a promising concept to deal with shocks and uncertainties in the face of environmental, social and economic crises (cf. Davoudi, 2012; White, 2010). Originating in ecology, resilience was referred to as the ability of a system to return to stability or equilibrium after a disturbance (Pickett et al., 2004). According to an early formulation by Holling (1973), resilience indicates the ability of ecosystems to absorb changes and still be able to function properly. In the past decade, a so-called 'resilience turn' (Evans & Reid, 2014) has taken place in the social, political and spatial sciences where social-ecological resilience has been explored and applied as a useful concept to describe and organize responses to change by communities, institutions and economies (Adger, 2000; Klein et al., 2004; White, 2010). In spatial planning, for example, resilience is now widely acknowledged as a new approach to incorporate uncertainty into governance strategies, particularly with respect to natural hazards such as flooding (Davoudi, 2012; White, 2010).