Making Space for the River

This book examines recent developments in river (flood) management from the viewpoint of Making Space for the River and the resulting challenges for water governance. Different examples from Europe and the United States of America are discussed that aim to ‘green’ rivers, including increasing river discharge for flood management, enhancing natural and landscape values, promoting local or regional economic development, and urban regeneration.  Making Space for the River presents not only opportunities and synergies but also risks as it crosses established institutional boundaries and touches on multiple stakeholder interests, which can easily clash. Making Space for the River helps the reader to understand the policy and governance dynamics that lead to these tensions and pays attention to a variety of attempts to organize effective and legitimate governance approaches.   The book helps to realize connections between policy domains, problem frames, and goals of different actors at different levels that contribute to decisive and legitimate action. Making Space for the River has an international comparative character that sheds light upon both the country-specific governance dilemmas which relate to specific state traditions and institutional characteristics of national water management, but also uncovers interesting similarities which provide us with building blocks to formulate more generic lessons about the governance of Making Space for the River in different institutional and social contexts.  The authors of this book come from a variety of disciplines including public administration, town and country planning, geography and anthropology, and these different disciplines bring multiple ways of knowing and understanding of Making Space for the River programs. The book combines interdisciplinary scientific analyses of Space for the River projects and programs with practical knowing and lessons-drawing. Making Space for the River is written for both practitioners and scholars and students of environmental policy, spatial planning, land use and water management.  Editors: Jeroen Warner, Assistant Professor of Disaster Studies, Wageningen University, The Netherlands. Arwin van Buuren, Associate Professor of Public Administration, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Jurian Edelenbos, Professor of Public Administration, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands.  

Table of Contents:
Making space: creating mind space and connecting values; Space for the river, a condensed state of the art; Space for the river; The troublesome search for acceptable programs of water, nature and development; Tripping over their own heels. A comparison of two Dutch Room for the River projects: Overdiepse Polder and Noordwaard; CalFed and Collaborative Watershed Management: Success Despite Failure?; Trends in Water Resources Management in the United States: The Rogue and Willamette River Cases; Where's the 'Space for Water'?: Flooding Policy Bottlenecks in England Finding 'Space for Water': Flooding Policy Bottlenecks in England; The Jubilee River: Flood Alleviation or Flood Creation Scheme on the Thames?; Making Space for German Rivers - Practical challenges and legal constraints; Strong Sentiments on the river Scheldt. Dike displacement in Flanders and the Netherlands; Flood-risk and watershed management conflicts in France: how Space for the River policies challenge resilience thinking; Joint strategic planning on the River Loire: the Brehemont experiment; Application of Dutch participatory planning methods to create more space for the Danube river in the Cat's bend region in Romania; Making Space for the river Tisza, Hungary;Conclusions

About the Author :
Jeroen Warner, Assistant Professor of Disaster Studies, Wageningen University, The Netherlands. Arwin van Buuren, Associate Professor of Public Administration, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Jurian Edelenbos, Professor of Public Administration, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands.