Estrategias sociales de prevención y adaptación Social ... - La RED

If no floods have occurred for a very long time, the floodplain as attractor becomes ever
more alluring. Floodplains, which are prime locations for residential and commercial developments
and reduce transport costs, are rediscovered as profitable investment sites for housing
and other human land uses, an individualist rationality.
The 2008 Delta Plan, a follow up to the 1953 plan to prepare for a climate–proof future,
again had nothing to say about spatial planning: the sea may rise by up to 1.35m in the next
two sentences, but Dutchmen can build wherever they want as long as the dikes and dunes
keep them safe. flying in the face of apparent reason, the Dutch planned a new housing development
project was planned at one of the country’s lowest spots, well below sea level in the
quaint town of Gouda, just because they can. Since the lifting of the ban on building in floodplains,
zoning has become a no-no.
Should a new flood catch the Netherlands unawares, however, a new cycle is likely to
start, with new incarnations of predictable social, economic and technical responses. The
below gives a rundown of the latest set of what are now promoted as “best practices”.
Reviving and Surviving Best Practices
Egalitarianism: Back to Social Resilience. Cross-cutting the technological and managerial
practices are the overall pattern of water governance.
In current policy folklore, we are currently moving from “government to governance”.
Likewise in the Netherlands water management is held to be “traditionally” top-down. Social
resilience and spatial adaptivity can be expected to be low in the Netherlands due to the
infrastructural investment fixing rather than moving with the water.
However, a closer look at history reveals that farmers, monks and businesses have taken
the lead long before the state took over a big chunk, and that public dominance in this has
only recently peaked, from the 1953 flood until the early 1990s, a time when decentralisation
and liberalisation took hold of the Netherlands.
In addition to local and regional water managers, civil charity continued to play a prominent
role in flood management in the period leading up to the French occupation (1798-
1806). “A blend of emergency and reconstruction aid in which civil charity, central state
involvement and the contribution of the Dutch kings mobilised a whole nation in times of
calamitous flood disasters.” Flood relief only gradually came to be nationalised in the
Netherlands between 1740 and 1861, the latter half coinciding with what Lintsen (2002).
Calls the “authoritarian period” in Dutch flood management.
Since the Delta works, finalised the 1980s, the Dutch have depended on the government
and technology to take care of their security. Until 1994 however, Dutch regions did not
even have evacuation plans, believing floods would never happen again. After the 1995 highwater
event, the Delta Law temporarily gave the public sector extra powers. In 2003 the centre-right
Dutch government however decided it would not be 100% responsible for floods. In
2006, and again in 2009, it called for self-reliance (zelfredzaamheid). The government
would now facilitate social self-help in disaster events. Awareness campaigns remain ambiguous
and exclusively focussed on households. So-called safety regions however are re-establishing
contact with civil society.
31