Asset management of flood defences as a co‐production—An analysis of cooperation in five situations in the Netherlands

Abstract Flood defences are in practice often multi‐used, multi‐managed and multi‐financed. Flood defence asset management contains technical, organizational and spatial complex issues involving multiple organizations. In the literature, little attention has been given to the conditions for successful cooperation between organizations in flood defence asset management. This paper elaborates on this aspect of mature asset management from a practical point of view. Although the importance of a fit‐for‐purpose cooperation seems trivial, practice shows that the shape of cooperation is often the coincidental result of implicit or ad‐hoc choices and is not deliberately designed. This paper reports on empirical data gathered in a case consisting of five different situations related to collaboration in flood defence management. The management context consists of three main tasks: performance assessment, reinforcement and daily management, and three decision levels: strategic, tactical and operational, resulting in nine different management environments and related interfaces. For effectively achieving desired outcomes, the shape of cooperation has to be explicitly chosen dependent on the complexity of content and organizational context, and relevant external circumstances: situational cooperation.