Distributing responsibilities for safety from flooding

In today’s society, safety from flooding is no longer the sole responsibility of the central government. In recent decades, we have witnessed a governance turn in flood risk management, in which private parties as well as regional and local governmental bodies have a role to play. As a result, the question of how to distribute the responsibilities among the actors involved has become urgent. We often want distribution to be efficient and effective as well as fair. This paper presents a preliminary review of the literature on responsibility in flood risk management. The results suggests that it is important that fairness is taken into account when distributing responsibility in flood risk management. Not only does the distribution of responsibility impact how the risks and burdens themselves are distributed, allocating responsibility to individual citizens without considering the perceived fairness of the responsibility ascription may have a negative influence on the legitimacy of flood risk arrangements and lead to resistance among individual citizens to take action.