Justice and flood risk management: reflecting on different approaches to distribute and allocate flood risk management in Europe

By T. Thaler, T. Hartmann. Natural Hazards, 2016

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper compares the inherent notions of justice in four different approaches to flood risk management in Europe. As protection against flood risks becomes increasingly difficult, dilemmas of justice emerge: some benefits from flood protection measures whereas others loose. Decisions on whom to protect differentiate between upstream and downstream or left and right side of a river. This raises a central but barely discussed conflict: what (or rather who) should be protected against inundations? This question deals in essence with justice. Justice concerns questions over fairness in the allocation of resources, capital and wealth across different members of society. There are different and contradicting concepts of justice, which differ in interpretations of fair resource allocation and distributions. ‘What’s the right thing to protect’ is thus a question of concepts of justice. This contribution is not an attempt to answer this fundamental question, but it offers a debate on how different concepts of justice provide different answers. These answers will then be related to flood risk management approaches in England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3905f38cb354d225ca089b547650de73b5eaa973

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

1. C. Kuhlicke
2. Sally Priest
3. Heidi Kreibich
4. P. Bubeck
5. T. Grothmann
6. Jeroen C. J. H. Aerts

In Sociology and Political Science

1. A. Heidenreich
2. C. Kuhlicke
3. C. Begg
4. Heidi Kreibich
5. P. Bubeck
6. S. Bamberg
7. T. Grothmann
8. Heesup Han

Citations in the corpus

• A framework for evaluating flood risk governance (2016, background): “Addressing these dilemmas, Thaler and Hartmann (2016) identify how different concepts of justice (utilitarian, libertarian and egalitarian) manifest in different FRM approaches.”
• The behavioral turn in flood risk management, its assumptions and potential implications (2020, background): “Others have started to highlight the critical role of procedural aspects in decision-making processes in FRM (Johnson, Penning-Rowsell, & Parker, 2007; Scolobig & Pelling, 2016; Thaler, Fuchs, Priest, & Doorn, 2018; Thaler & Hartmann, 2016; Walker & Burningham, 2011).”