Surfacing Hidden Social Innovation for a Hidden Form of Flood Risk: The Story of Project Groundwater

ABSTRACT Across the last decade ‘resilience’ has become a guiding principle for flood risk management (FRM) policymakers. The importance of the role of communities has been recognised, and there is a growing emphasis on innovation to contend with the complexity in community resilience building. Problematic traditional approaches and norms of risk authorities and other stakeholders need to be tackled to bring about meaningful change across social relationships and existing behaviours through social innovation. The paper presents an exploratory case study: Project Groundwater, a partnership building community resilience to groundwater flooding. Following interviews with Project Groundwater partners, we suggest that social innovation was largely ‘hidden’ from view. This paper uses a ‘communication continuum’ to set out the project's communication journey, making visible the processes and practices lying under the surface to reach a novel collaborative relationship with communities. The findings demonstrate a need for sustained focus and commitment to understanding and making further social innovation visible, together with the fostering of capabilities to resource and incentivise wider implementation. The research offers a new perspective on social innovation, with a specific focus on communication to support local level community resilience building to flood risk.