Negotiating Risk and Responsibility: Political Economy of Flood Protection Management in Northern Finland

Abstract

Floods occur every spring in Northern Finland. These floods attract locals to the shores of rivers to admire the movement of melting ice and strength of the water. Floods also damage buildings, roads and disturb everyday life in many ways. The EU Flood Directive (2007) and its national implementation recently require local and regional authorities as well as inhabitants to take the threat of floods more seriously and prepare better for them than before. This chapter investigates the rationalities in developing regional flood management plans for two major flooding rivers in Lapland, for Ivalo and Kemi Rivers in 2013-2015. Although, there were some similarities in debates concerning the flood management planning in both cases, outcomes of the two participatory planning processes were quite different in terms of assessing the level of risk and defining responsibilities to tackle it. Regional flood management is politically much larger issue than to find a feasible and economically sensible technical solution for effective flood protection.