Making room for nature? Applying the Dutch Room for the River approach to flood risk management in Alberta, Canada

ABSTRACT

Transferring the Dutch Room for the River (RftR) to other jurisdictions is not just about changes in technology. It also requires a fundamental shift in culture and governance, and hence is challenging to implement. Through a qualitative case study and applying a frame/framing analytical lens, we examine how the Dutch RftR was perceived and implemented in southern Alberta, Canada in three projects. Overall, Alberta interviewees perceived the RftR projects as triggering a paradigm shift from ‘fighting water’ to ‘living with water’ and as opening opportunities to expand this approach into future flood risk management projects across the province. But did this support translate into policies and practices? We explore the extent to which Alberta adopted four features of the RftR approach: (a) shifting away from mega-infrastructure, (b) making space for rivers, (c) moving people, and (d) regulating floodplain development. Also drawing on policy adoption models, we assess whether the RftR approach resulted in a significant shift towards more preventative, environmentally sustainable flood mitigation to reduce disaster risks and damages or whether a business-as-usual approach of undeterred development in flood-prone areas was undertaken with resulting reliance on disaster relief programmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Room for the River
• frames and framing
• policy adoption
• flood risk management and governance
• nature and social mitigation
• Alberta

Acknowledgements

Eva would like to thank her foreign study advisors Jan P.M. van Tatenhove (while at Wageningen University, currently at Aalborg University) and Frans Klijn (Delft University) for their guidance on researching the Room for the River program in the Netherlands. Also, thank you to Dan Henstra (University of Waterloo) for his editing suggestions. Thank you to all of the interviewees in Alberta and the Netherlands who took the time to participate in this research and for your valuable insights and contributions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Highwood River is one of the most successful fish habitats in that basin and is thus valuable for nature conservation.

2 The floodway is where the water flow is the most destructive—new development is discouraged in this area (Government of Alberta [GoA], 2018). The flood fringe is on the shoulder of the floodway where the water is shallower and flows slower. A flood hazard area includes both the floodway and the flood fringe. New development is permitted in the flood fringe provided that buildings are floodproofed.

3 Flood (risk) management encompasses specific policies and practices developed to prevent, manage, and reduce the impact of disasters and across the four disaster phases: preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. Flood risk governance includes flood management but is a broader concept in that it incorporates how actors interact with and influence one another when developing and implementing decisions.

4 Frames and framing are often used interchangeably in the literature but in this article, we draw on Dewulf et al. (2009) to differentiate between them.

5 The levee effect was coined by Gilbert White in 1947 and is well documented (Hutton et al. 2018).

6 Adaptation is the incorporation of a basic model with some changes. Imitation is also known as copying or mimicking. Inspiration is creating new policies based on aspects of policies from elsewhere and can result in a hybrid system (Minkman et al. 2018).

7 For a complete list of flood mitigation projects in High River, see Town of High River (2015).

8 The Bow and Elbow Rivers flow through Calgary and are part of the BRB. The Highwood River is also part of the BRB but is excluded in the BRB RftR project.

9 The decisions to relocate two neighbourhoods in High River were made quickly by the Alberta Government and High River's town council without meaningful public engagement (Anon et al. 2018). In contrast, the BRB and RDRB RftR projects included in-depth dialogue and collaboration through workshops involving specific stakeholders (technical working groups, watershed groups, and user groups). However, the public was able to provide limited feedback on the draft basin project reports. Public engagement plays an important role in the Dutch RftR approach, but a detailed examination is outside the scope of this article.

10 Dry dams, also called off-site detention or off-stream retention measures, make room for water by storing it but do not make space for rivers as functional ecosystems.

11 Rewilding rivers is an approach that emerged in Britain in the 1990s.

12 The professional maxim of hydrologists across Canada: ‘Keep people away from water, not water away from people’ (McGillivray 2015, para. 12).

13 The term resiliency in the report refers to climate change with respect to drought and rain (Morris et al., 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement: [grant number 771-2016-0038]; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: [grant number 767-2014-1392].