Abstract
Flooding is among the most damaging climate-related hazards globally. Many countries, especially industrialized nations, have reduced flood risk through physical flood control infrastructure. Intensifying climate change—with rising sea levels and more frequent and intense extreme precipitation events—will lead to increased and dynamic, rather than static, risk levels. In order to dynamically adapt while paying attention to a wider range of societal priorities, innovative flood risk management approaches might need to be taken. Two examples of approaches that require, or result in, more room for water in our landscapes are managed retreat and the slightly broader Dutch concept of meebewegen (‘living with water’). However, little is known about these innovative flood-risk management approaches. This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary approach and focusses on two different contexts across three independent research chapters. The first two chapters provide a critical evaluation of existing federal policy in the United States that has led to the voluntary property buyout of more than 45,000 households over three decades. The first chapter focusses on known issues relating to equity within voluntary property buyout programs—spanning distributive, procedural, and interactional dimensions of social justice. The study presented in the second chapter combines buyout details with real estate transaction data to track participant post-buyout relocations. The third chapter pivots toward forward-looking policy in the Netherlands and explores the role that the emerging concept of meebewegen could play in climate change adaptation in the Netherlands, including how and when meebewegen could be implemented at scale in the future. Combined, these research chapters provide novel contributions to the study of managed retreat and meebewegen as innovative flood-risk management approaches.