Recently a shift is advocated from traditional flood prevention to more adaptive strategies. These strategies focus on the reduction of and recovery from flood impacts as a means to improve the resilience to increased river discharge levels and sea level rise from climate change. This shift has had implications for the public-private divide in adaptive flood risk governance. For the urban context it means that private actors come into play such as developers, housing corporations and residents, necessitating multi-actor collaboration facilitated by governance arrangements which cross the public-private divide. The division of responsibilities for water safety between the public and private sectors affects the way legitimacy is attained for these arrangements and raises new legitimacy issues. The paper offers an analysis of public and private responsibilities in adaptive flood risk governance arrangements as well as an analysis of the legitimacy of the arrangements in light of the public-private divide. A comparative case study is presented for three urban regeneration projects in un-embanked areas in Hamburg-Germany, Helsinki-Finland and Rotterdam-The Netherlands where adaptive strategies have been applied. The results convey that network arrangements with joint public-private responsibilities use direct forms of participation and deliberation, but that these do not necessarily lead to more legitimate arrangements in the eyes of stakeholders as is often suggested in literature. Both network and more public hierarchical arrangements can be perceived as quite legitimate under certain conditions.
