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AbstractIn 2015, China?s national government initiated a Sponge City Programme to address its urban flood issues. A sponge city is a city built around the concept of managing water in an ecologically sustainable way. The intention is to improve urban resilience through rainwater capture, storage and use. This article applies a four-mode governance framework to analyze the programme. It identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the programme implementation and provides recommendations.

Adaptation to climate change is gradually becoming accepted as one of the major challenges in regional and urban planning. However, the scope for options that make our societies less vulnerable to flood risks, disruptive quantities of rainwater in cities, or urban heat stress tends to be narrowed down, often implicitly, by the existing institutional context. Institutions reflect past choices made regarding the legitimate distribution of burdens and benefits between government and society of measures against weather-related calamities. Alternative options, like innovative dyke concepts, green roofs, or urban planning to reduce heat stress, would require political debate on the legitimacy of different arrangements and would take climate adaptation policy out of the technocratic 'comfort zone'. This article offers a framework of analysis for describing the institutionalized distribution of responsibilities for initiation, implementation, costs and liability for climate adaptation measures, and the shift in these that alternative options would entail. Furthermore, it offers four perspectives for assessing the legitimacy of present and alternative distributions. The framework is applied to the Dutch context in three cases concerning flooding, urban water drainage and urban heat stress.

In discussing legal and policy frameworks for flood risk management, the attention is often put on increasing resilience in public spaces. In terms of private properties, discussions are geared toward enhancing the adaptive capacity of future developments. This paper focuses on the instruments associated with resilience of existing privately owned residential buildings mainly from the perspective of post-flood policies and compensation regimes. The paper scrutinizes the relevant legal and policy landscapes in the United States, the European Union and two Member States – the UK and the Netherlands. The goal is to provide mutual lessons learned between the EU, its Member States, and the US and to set forth generally applicable recommendations for improving post-flood policies for existing buildings.

European urban agglomerations face increasing flood risks due to urbanization and the effects of climate change. These risks are addressed at European, national and regional policy levels. A diversification and alignment of Flood Risk Management Strategies (FRMSs) can make vulnerable urban agglomerations more resilient to flooding, but this may require new Flood Risk Governance Arrangements (FRGAs) or changes in existing ones. While much technical knowledge on Flood Risk Management is available, scientific insights into the actual and/or necessary FRGAs so far are rather limited and fragmented. This article addresses this knowledge gap by presenting a research approach for assessing FRGAs. This approach allows for the integration of insights from policy scientists and legal scholars into one coherent framework that can be used to identify Flood Risk Management Strategies and analyse Flood Risk Governance Arrangements. In addition, approaches for explaining and evaluating (shifts in) FRGAs are introduced. The research approach is illustrated by referring to the rise of the Dutch risk-based approach called 'multi-layered safety' and more specifically its application in the city of Dordrecht. The article is concluded with an overview of potential next steps, including comparative analyses of FRGAs in different regions. Insights in these FRGAS are crucial to enable the identification of action perspectives for flood risk governance for actors at the level of the EU, its member states, regional authorities, and public-private partnerships.

Over the past several decades, environmental governance has made substantial progress in addressing environmental change, but emerging environmental problems require new innovations in law, policy, and governance. While expansive legal reform is unlikely to occur soon, there is untapped potential in existing laws to address environmental change, both by leveraging adaptive and transformative capacities within the law itself to enhance social-ecological resilience and by using those laws to allow social-ecological systems to adapt and transform. Legal and policy research to date has largely overlooked this potential, even though it offers a more expedient approach to addressing environmental change than waiting for full-scale environmental law reform. We highlight examples from the United States and the European Union of untapped capacity in existing laws for fostering resilience in social-ecological systems. We show that governments and other governance agents can make substantial advances in addressing environmental change in the short term—without major legal reform—by exploiting those untapped capacities, and we offer principles and strategies to guide such initiatives.