Egocentric Networks in Urban Flood Risk Management

This paper argues that urban flood risk management emerges to be a pivotal policy domain for making municipalities resilient and adaptive in regard to climate change. Further, to better understand the respective local governance arrangements one needs to take into account the actual administrators’ information exchange networks. In a situation where at least in Germany normative and institutional preconditions set mainly by the states are only slowly catching up, practitioners turn to these networks to make the local governance setting work, presumably shaping most municipalities green-blue infrastructures for the future. Heavy rainfalls are applying massive stress on urban water infrastructure. As they become more frequent and more severe due to climate change they are challenging municipalities globally. At the same time, at least from the perspective of a single municipality, their occurrence is very uncertain and the resources to cope and prepare are spread over several groups of stakeholders. This calls for taking a perspective of adaptive and network governance and for reflecting on how the respective policy domain is structured relationally. Further, research needs to develop methods that can be applied to settings not only in a specific national context, but also internationally. For this purpose we applied egocentric network analysis to information exchange networks of local administrators responsible for dealing with urban flood risk management, starting with municipalities in the German states of Nordrhein-Westfalen and Baden-Württemberg. They were varyingly affected by urban floodings in the past and are subject to the states specific water governance regimes. At least exploratively we are therefore able to spot differences dependent on institutional and normative conditions and the actuality of respective events. The proposed paper will begin by laying out how urban flood risk management can be understood as leverage to drive climate change adaptation at the local level. Most importantly, it binds together multiple tasks of water sensitive development and connects them to urgent and core responsibilities of municipalities. Assuming that media coverage and the better availability of hydrological data changed local administrators’ risk perception, they are more and more willing to take on the respective tasks despite their complexity. It will then be shown how egocentric network analysis can be usefully applied to capture such a situation of emerging local governance, for example by being agnostic to the distinction of formality/informality. By that, much more complete and otherwise hidden structures are revealed. In its empirical section different urban flood risk networks and their structural properties will be compared. The paper then discusses the relation of certain structural network properties and adaptive/resilient governance and how the rising attention of the states might affect local networks. Having systematically evaluated different methods of gathering data (e.g. online survey, focus group), the paper finally looks ahead towards developing an approach able to not only compare municipalities in Germany but in different international settings.