**Preface to "Flood Risk Governance for More Resilience"**

Resistance-based strategies for flood risk management (FRM), which are based on controlling floods via structural infrastructure, laws and regulations, have been increasingly challenged in the last 20 years. Instead of seeking to build 'fail-safe' systems that remove the threat and try to minimize societal and economic losses, new approaches are being developed that are considered 'safe-to-fail'. These approaches embrace uncertainty and put emphasis on adaptation instead of control. Such resilience-based approaches address the need to absorb water and recover from floods, and focus on the potential of societal systems to transform in response to stressors. There is emerging evidence that a diversification of flood risk management strategies contributes to more flood resilience. The idea is that a roster of strategies is applied: addressing flood risk prevention through pro-active spatial planning, flood defence, flood mitigation, flood preparation and flood recovery. Recent research efforts have significantly contributed to knowledge on the mechanisms through which a diversification and alignment of strategies may take place in different contexts. Different sub-themes have attracted attention. Firstly, the role of citizens and stakeholders in FRM has been investigated in terms of public participation, collaboration, co-production, communication and perception of flood risk, amongst other topics. Secondly, FRM policies have been analysed, investigating their structures, assumptions and limitations. In addition, the application of policies as well as their feasibility and performance have been scrutinized. Thirdly, there are studies on particular FRM measures and tools, dealing with their applicability to policies and decision making. A cross-cutting issue in this area of research is the role of governance. FRM has become an increasingly reflexive policy domain. Initially, FRM relied on top-down decisions, but these have become much more embedded in a dense network of relations, with stakeholders holding various powers, resources and competences. These present-day developments lead to several emerging questions about the role of governance in FRM: How do we integrate traditional resistance-based measures with non-structural approaches? How would cooperative natural-social sciences research advance the role of governance in building flood resilience? How do we (re)conceptualize resilience to capture the governance and the resistance aspects of FRM? How could social experimentation approaches transform FRM? How do we frame FRM to identify win-win situations where environmental (e.g., biodiversity conservation) and social (e.g., equality) aims are integrated? The ten papers collected in this book look critically at flood risk governance, unpack the issues discussed above and identify important new research areas. Case studies have been derived from Europe, America and Asia in order to produce novel theoretical and methodological insights enriching our understanding of new approaches to flood risk governance.

> **Piotr Matczak, Dries L. T. Hegger** *Editors*
