A Comparative Analysis of the Transformation of Governance Systems: Land-Use Planning for Flood Risk

This paper seeks to address a deficit in the literature by undertaking a comparative case analysis of two governance systems for flood-prone areas in the state of Queensland, Australia, where flood governance consisted of two different regimes: adaptive and precautionary. We compare the evolution and characteristics of the two regimes, with a focus on each regime's ability to detect change, interact across scales and transform after the 2011 flood disaster in Queensland. We find that the challenges for adaptive governance include ad hoc successes, a lack of overarching guidance and regulation, and limited capacity to exploit results, but the challenges of moving to a precautionary style are also substantial. We argue that an adaptive-precautionary typology has limited utility, and that empirical evidence at the local-regional scale demonstrates a mix of both which are heavily path-dependent. The grand assumption that governance in general should move from precaution and hierarchy to adaptiveness and networks is far more complicated at the local-regional scale. Given the dominant preference globally for incrementalism and softer ways of governing, we call for further research on how adaptive modes of governance might be both reinforced by and scaled up over time to achieve more precautionary overarching strategies.