4. From Levees to Flood Insurance: The Spatial Turn in US Flood Governance

This chapter focuses on the shift from a “safety” to a “spatial” approach in US flood governance, which took place over the course of the 20th century. It reconstructs the policymaking process underlyig to shift to analyze role and impacts of expert-influence on the distributive decision-making process. Three conclusions are drawn. First, that expert-influence should be understood as the product of the self-organization of expert-groups and political-contextual factors that set boundaries around what expertise was considered relevant in US flood governance. Second, while experts greatly influenced the development of spatial measures in the US, their involvement did not reduce political attention for the distributive implications of spatial policies. On the contrary, they contributed to a better understanding of these distributive implications by specifying the costs involved with spatial measures for different groups in society. Third, with the institutionalization of spatial measures in US flood governance, room was given to a new type of “administrative” experts, who placed emphasis on the operational effectiveness of the US spatial approach to floods. Because of this, past distributive choices were not reconsidered in the light of external developments in the policy field such as climate change.