From gray copycats to green wolves: policy and infrastructure for flood risk management

Flooding has affected over two billion people since 1995. While gray infrastructure such as levees and dams has traditionally been used to mitigate this hazard, many communities are looking for approaches to augment or replace some of these structural solutions. Propelled by the regulatory support for green infrastructure approaches for stormwater management, some communities are also looking to green infrastructure for flood risk management (FRM). We apply the internal determinants and regional diffusion models to evaluate how floodplain management policies are evolving in place and diffusing through policy networks in several case studies from Oregon, US. We then develop several propositions as a way of focusing our findings on the community objectives and policy processes for FRM, contributing to the literature on policy innovation and adoption, and elucidating the nuances of these models for explaining FRM.