Community action on natural flood management and the governance of a catchment-based approach in the UK

There is increasing interest in natural flood management (NFM) and the delivery of public environmental goods. Yet the implementation of NFM can be ad-hoc and is regionally diverse. Communities often play a role in NFM and thus we assess NFM governance in the UK and communities' position within it. We develop a theoretical framework using the concepts of public goods, social capital, collective action and polycentrism and use it to examine the governance of the design and implementation of NFM in Pickering and Calderdale in Yorkshire, to contribute to a debate on how NFM should be managed, by whom, and under what governance arrangements. Drawing on stakeholder interviews, we find that the participation of community flood groups (CFGs) in NFM improved community access to strategic conversations on flood risk management (FRM). In turn CFGs raised the public profile of NFM, enabled the deployment of NFM measures, and helped to generate the evidence base on them. We conclude that there is a need for a polycentric community and catchment-based approach to better coordinate NFM governance across and between scales, to support community access and contribution to flood risk strategy, and to foster sustainable flood risk management.