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Improved cooperation

It is important that all stakeholders are involved in the prioritisation process. The quality of their cooperation whether institutions, authorities or the public, influences the outcome of implementation (Sander, 2018). Water management authorities typically work at river basin and catchment scales, while land use planners typically work at the scale of administrative areas, such as municipalities. As a result, their planning units often do not match up, creating barriers in terms of integration (EC, 2014).

Floodplain restoration projects will face large opposition if they do not make sense to the local community or to landowners affected by the restoration. Hence, in the planning phase there is a need to be transparent in communicating the project aims and to be open to changes. Overall, public support has been found to be essential for the success and acceptance of floodplain restoration measures. It has also been found that once completed, a large majority of the local population greatly value the restored area. An analysis of public acceptance towards river restoration in Germany found that even in full awareness of the costs of restoration projects (approximately 400,000 Euros per river km), 70% of the interviewees regard further restoration projects as useful and only 6% as not useful (Deffner and Haase, 2018). An example of citizen engagement is provided in Box 8,