Assessing the legitimacy of flood risk governance arrangements in Europe: insights from intracountry evaluations

Abstract

Legitimacy is often dwarfed by preoccupations with resilience in the context of Flood Risk Governance Arrangements (FRGA), thus methods for assessing and monitoring legitimacy are noticeably lacking. This study attempts to fill this gap. Acknowledging the multi-faceted nature of legitimacy, we adopt the criteria of social equity, accountability, transparency, participation, access to information and procedural justice to evaluate the FRGA in six European countries, employing positive legal analysis and comparative study. This novel approach establishes benchmarks for determining the extent to which current FRGAs achieve or are distanced from legitimacy aspirations.