Flood and Drought risk governance: A narrative review of different disciplines

The governance of floods and droughts does not stem from a single school of thought but rather emerges from subcomponents within diverse sectoral frameworks such as water resources management (WRM), disaster risk management (DRM), and climate adaptation governance, to name a few [20]. These sectoral frameworks address a broader array of issues beyond floods and droughts, such as water quality and allocation in the case of WRM, pandemics or terrorism for DRM, or ecosystem loss and intergenerational impacts for climate adaptation governance.

To inform the conceptual development of this paper, a narrative review synthesizes the governance dimensions of floods and droughts, identifying and grouping relevant elements across selected sectoral frameworks (i.e., WRM, DRM, adaptation governance, flood risk management and drought risk management) into a common analytical space. The literature search strategy combined key terms such as “flood,” “drought,” and “governance,” with selected sectoral frameworks including “water resources management,” “disaster risk management,” and “climate adaptation.” Searches were carried out primarily using the SCOPUS database in combination with the Research Rabbit application linked to the Zotero reference manager. This grouping allowed for the exploration of citation networks and the identification of relevant literature clusters, supporting a chronological and thematic mapping of research at the intersection of flood, drought and governance. This process guided the selection of literature that met the following criteria: (i) how floods and droughts are conceptualized within each sectoral framework; and (ii) the extent to which governance aspects are addressed in sectoral approaches to floods and droughts.

The narrative review was structured around two lines of inquiry: i) what are the shortcomings of individual sectoral governance frameworks when applied in isolation, and how do these limitations hinder the synergistic management of floods and droughts?; and ii) which key features from each sectoral framework are relevant to enable such synergistic management, and how can these key features be grouped to inform the changes required in existing governance systems for the synergistic management of floods and droughts?

In the subsections that follow, the findings of the narrative review are organized by sectoral framework, with key insights summarized in Table 1. The findings of the narrative review serve as key inputs for the second part of this paper, which presents and elaborates the proposed conceptual framework.

Download:

• PPT
  PowerPoint slide
• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Table 1. Sectoral governance frameworks: key features, shortcomings and overarching thematic areas s for hydroclimatic risk management.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000417.t001

Water resources management governance: key features and shortcomings for hydroclimatic risk management

The evolution of Integrated WRM governance continues to benefit from academic debate and expanding practice [32,33]. Normative WRM governance literature – focused in generating principles and standards – and practitioner WRM governance literature – focused on experimentation – have coexisted and evolved, building on analytical studies and practice. From the 1960s to the late 1980s, there was a common presumption that strong central governments were best placed to command and control the management of resources and avoid their overuse and ultimate destruction [30,34]. Since then, there has been a trend moving away from normative and centralized water governance systems to approaches that build on diverse local practices [35–37].

Normative WRM governance literature has changed over time, moving from concepts such as the Dublin Principles for integrated water resources management – highlighting the importance of basin planning, participation, and the notion of water as a scarce economic good – to the incorporation of new concepts and/or the redefinition of others – such as water security, social inclusion, climate resilience or the food-energy-environment nexus [32,38–40]. This change has been informed by areas such as common pool resources management and socio-ecological systems, participatory decentralization and co-management, among others [26,41,42]. Given that WRM governance is a highly contextual and ever changing approach, influenced by physical factors, levels of economic and social development as well as political and cultural norms, efforts to promote normative approaches such as Dublin Principles or those emerging from other global water conventions are considered to have delivered limited practical impact [32,33,41].

Practitioner WRM literature argues that the diversity of challenges, institutional frameworks, changing dynamics and contexts, prevents generalizations. The proliferation of practitioner literature demonstrates the capacity of local governments and civil society organizations to manage and conserve natural resources, thereby challenging centralist and normative approaches in favor of polycentric government systems [34].

Polycentric governance systems consist of a network of nested decision centers at multiple levels coupled with an overall framework that enables coordination among them [34,40]. Polycentricity steers away from centralized normative governance systems to allow for a variety of coordinated approaches between different decision centers that deliver results to local populations [39,43]. Positive characteristics of polycentric governance systems include enabling collaboration within and across government levels to better meet local needs [35]. A plethora of literature on practical applications seems to point out the robustness of such an approach in a variety of socio-ecological systems including water and the environment [44], water and agriculture [35,45,46], water and drought [47,48], water and disaster risk management [20,49], and more recently, floods and droughts [13,50].

Polycentricity is a key feature of WRM with potential application to the nested decision centers needed to manage floods and droughts, such as sectoral government agencies or communities. However, further study is required to identify and describe the overarching framework that enables collaboration between these decision centers, particularly in the context of hydroclimatic risk management, as well as to better understand the challenges associated with implementation [50].

While WRM plays a critical role in the proactive management of floods and droughts, it remains insufficient as a standalone approach to fully manage them. A key shortcoming arises during the post-disaster response and recovery phases, where WRM tends to play a secondary role and other frameworks such as DRM assume greater prominence [7]. In the particular case of proactive drought risk management, land use management becomes central, and sectors like agriculture and natural resources management emerge as essential players in decision-making [51,52].

Disaster risk management governance: key features and shortcomings for hydroclimatic risk management

Modern DRM governance has evolved rapidly building from a focus on response and recovery to proactive prevention, mitigation, and preparedness [5]. Best practices in DRM governance generally involve a decentralized effort focused in building a synergistic multi-level and multi-sector network of stakeholders at all stages of the risk management cycle [53].

Particularly for hydroclimatic risks, governments have historically focused on responding to and recovering from floods and droughts, often neglecting the underlying causes that turn natural hazards into human disasters [11,49,53,54]. This dynamic is described by Wilhite as the hydro-illogical circle, focusing on drought risk management. The hydro-illogical circle captures a recurrent pattern in which a surge of urgent activity and policy attention follows a drought, only to be replaced by a period of apathy once it rains and the immediate shock subsides. As the disaster fades from public and political focus, other priorities dominate the agenda, resulting in limited sustained preparation for the next drought disaster [55]. An interesting counterargument is emerging in the literature, highlighting the connections between disaster-related crises and opportunities for transformative change. For example, severe floods have, in some cases, triggered a paradigm shift in flood management [19,56]. Although more research is needed to analyze in which conditions disasters can enable changes, current evidence emphasizes how crises can foster strategic collaborations at the local and national level to trigger and steer changes towards more resilient development trajectories [36,57].

An increasingly recognized DRM paradigm moves from reactive response to proactive risk reduction [58]. This new approach is perhaps best captured in the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 which focuses on the adoption of measures that address all dimensions of disaster risk (i.e., hazard, exposure, and vulnerability) including prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response, recovery, and rehabilitation [59]. The Sendai Framework, builds on the previous Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015, which highlighted the need to strengthen disaster-risk governance as a lesson learned and a future challenge [60]. As such, the Sendai Framework places the strengthening of governance as one of its four priorities to manage disaster risk [59].

Modern DRM literature includes key concepts such as whole-systems approach – incorporating multiple elements, causes and effects, feedback loops and cascading impacts – and a focus on those more vulnerable as core principles [14,59]. Importantly, DRM highlights the importance of collaboration among key stakeholders such as government, citizens, the scientific community, the private sector and those most vulnerable to prepare, respond and recover to disasters [14,53,59,61,62]. Finally, the traditional risk paradigm that focuses on single hazards and risks faced by a particular community or economic sector is giving way to multi-hazard strategies and a better understanding of the interconnection between multiple risks and their associated impacts [63].

DRM key features – such as proactive multi-hazard risk management, cross- sectoral and multilevel governance collaboration, strong partnerships between government and communities, and a focus on vulnerable populations – are highly relevant for the synergistic management of floods and drought. Yet additional analysis is needed to deepen understanding of the conceptual and operational implications associated with feedback mechanisms between floods and droughts, both as multi-hazards and in the context of their proactive and holistic management [9,26].

DRM theory and practice are cornerstone in managing the response and recovery of floods and droughts and place an important focus on the need to further develop prevention, mitigation, and preparedness. Yet DRM in isolation is insufficient to comprehensively address all risk management stages across the entire hydroclimatic spectrum. A key shortcoming is particularly evident in the domains of prevention and mitigation, where core competences generally lie within other sectors such as WRM, agriculture, natural resources management, or finance. For example, the management of river basins or coastal zones for flood or drought risk management often falls outside the formal mandate of DRM agencies. Yet it is imperative for DRM agencies to actively collaborate with relevant sectors by bringing a necessary disaster risk management lens to sectoral strategies and operations [7].

Climate change adaptive governance: key features and shortcomings for hydroclimatic risk management

In addition to DRM governance focused on avoiding, minimizing and managing hydroclimatic risks, climate change adaptive governance has emerged more recently to focus on managing the evolving risks resulting from climate change both today and in the future [64]. Adaptive governance has its roots in resilience theory [36,41,65] and signifies the ability to change management practices to better cope with existing and future risks based on continuous learning and contextual information [26].

The detailed review of policies and strategies designed to adapt to climate change reveals that they often encounter an implementation gap [26,66,67]. Adaptive governance is well recognized as a concept but it is very hard to implement and sustain in practice [18,50,68,69]. The difficulties associated with adaptive governance are attributed to the inherent scientific uncertainties and diverse perception of risks associated with climate change [26,27,70]. Indeed, climate-induced risks exhibit characteristics of a wicked problem – a complex, unpredictable, open ended challenge that is resistant to solution [22,34,71,72] and that tends to neither have agreement on the problem itself nor on the solution [72].

As floods and drought risk will continue to increase due to climate change, a key feature of adaptive governance is that it brings the necessity to change in order to adapt to developing and uncertain circumstances to the forefront of its theoretical framework and focuses on the characteristics, drivers, and challenges of such change [29,73]. In addtion, adaptive governance has spearheaded an important collaborative process across nations in the form of international agreements highlighting and focusing on the process of mainstreaming climate change considerations across sectors at the national and transboundary level [68,74,75].

However, an important shortcoming is that adaptive governance, implemented in isolation, remains insufficient to manage hydroclimatic risks operationally. This limitation is reflected in the persistent adaptation gap, as periodically measured by the United Nations in its Adaptation Gap Report. The report highlights critical challenges such as a widening financial gap, fragmented institutional approaches, and the continued exclusion of vulnerable populations [66]. Flood and drought risk management, even if intimately impacted by climate change, are considered a more imminent and well perceived risk, increasing the likelihood of action and reducing their relative implementation gap [26,76]. Increasing the implementation of adaptive governance might require a fundamental change of institutions, perceptions and interactions – which often are reticent to change [69,77].

Flood and drought risk management: key features and shortcomings for hydroclimatic risk management

Flood risk management is deeply rooted in both water resources management and disaster risk management. Integrated WRM focuses in the management of land, water and risks at the basin level to maximize economic and social wellbeing [9]. The literature on the governance of floods is dominated by the disaster-risk focused prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery (PMPRR) framework [53].

Historically, governments have based flood prevention on infrastructure to reduce risks – perhaps as a legacy from the normative, centric, command-and-control approach to WRM – coupled with emergency management – or a reactive approach to DRM. As the DRM and WRM literature and practice have incrementally shifted their focus on the proactive management of flood risks, a key feature has been the growing the emphasis on people-centered non-structural flood risk management practices [9].

A key feature of flood risk PMPRR is the presence of water and disaster risk-related laws and institutions tasked with the overall responsibility of coordinating with a variety of actors within the national government and society to reduce flood hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. For example, the DRM agency might collaborate with the WRM agency for issues around infrastructure maintenance and operation, or with the hydrometeorology agency for flood observation and early warnings. The DRM agency often is also tasked with collaborating and organizing with local governments, scientific institutions and communities specially those most vulnerable on matters around contingency planning, flood observation and analysis and socially-inclusive flood risk management [7].

Droughts have also been addressed generally in a reactive manner, managing the crisis instead of proactively forecasting and managing the risk [9,51,78]. The disaster-risk centered PMPRR approach is less prevalent for drought, and when drought is presented within DRM it often focuses on response and recovery. This emphasis might be explained by the difficulties in declaring a slow-onset hazard a disaster [53]. Moreover, while drought might significantly impact agricultural production, floods are generally perceived as a more direct threat to public safety which may explain the DRM focus on floods.

The WRM approach to drought management has historically focused on the management of blue water, that is, the water stored in rivers, reservoirs, lakes, and groundwater aquifers [7]. However the modern conception of drought management includes the management of green water, or the water stored in unsaturated soil, absorbed by plants or evaporated from the soil [52]. Green water plays an irreplaceable role in global ecosystems and food production, accounting for around 80 percent of global food production and exclusively sustaining grassland and forest ecosystems [79,80].

A key feature of drought risk management is its reliance on cross-sectoral collaboration, requiring the active participation of meteorological and hydrological agencies, WRM, DRM, agriculture, natural resources management and finance sectors, to name a few [7,52,81]. As countries around the world attempt to move away from reactive to proactive approaches, there is abundant recognition of the need to develop drought policies that incentivize collaboration among different actors [51,82]. It is generally necessary to develop a specific drought risk management framework that goes beyond the sector-specific domains and seeks to coordinate and synergize the efforts of several different entities [7,52]. The High-Level Meeting on National Drought Policy of 2013, and the more recent one in 2024, highlighted the role of National Drought Policies as fundamental to enable collaboration among the different actors for proactive drought management and increased resilience [83,84].

Most research and practice on hydroclimatic risk management focuses either on flood risk or on drought risk. This siloed approach is a key shortcoming as it overlooks critical interactions and can result in unintended consequences and missed opportunities, limiting the synergistic management of the entire hydroclimatic spectrum [2,11,25]. Flood and drought can happen consecutively, or even simultaneously, exacerbating each other’s impacts and causing both cascading and ripple effects across different sectors and systems [85,86]. The most used approaches to understand the relationship between floods and drought are focused on the physical aspects and compounding impacts [2,11,19,24,25,87]. More research is needed to better understand why siloed flood and drought risk management persist, the associated negative consequences as well as the potential benefits of their synergistic management.

Analysis of the different governance frameworks: key features and shortcomings

The previous sections highlight that the governance of floods and droughts does not stem from a single school of thought but rather from key features across disciplines. At the same time, the narrative review points out shortcomings denoting that none of these sectoral governance frameworks in isolation are enough to manage the increasing risks emerging from floods and droughts.

The narrative review shows that significant variation exists among the sectoral governance frameworks underpinning flood and drought management in terms of their scope, focus, defining attributes, sense of urgency, and historical evolution. Some frameworks are spatially grounded and aligned with physical systems, such as a river basins, exemplified by WRM. Others operate at a national level, emphasizing systemic processes and institutional collaboration, as seen in DRM and climate change adaptation [34,53]. The degree of practical application also differs: while frameworks such as WRM and DRM are supported by extensive implementation experience, others such as Adaptative governance continue to grapple with significant and well documented implementation gaps [33,66,67]. The governance frameworks also vary in their focus on the disaster risk management cycle. DRM typically focuses on response and recovery, whereas WRM and flood and drought governance contribute in greater depth to prevention and mitigation efforts.

Despite their disciplinary differences, these sectoral governance frameworks include several key features that are highly relevant to the synergistic management of floods and droughts and that might otherwise be lost in siloed scholarly and operational differentiation [20]. Within WRM, DRM, and adaptive governance key features include an emphasis on cross-sectoral and multilevel collaboration, as well as the critical role of societal engagement. Both flood risk management and drought risk management stress the importance of operational collaboration across sectors as well as proactive approaches to risk management [25]. One of the DRM key features is its explicit emphasis on multi-hazard risks and their disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations, offering a more holistic and inclusive perspective on the interconnected nature of a variety of risks [85,88]. A key feature of adaptive governance is its emphasis on flexible and responsive management practices that change to meet evolving circumstances to better cope with existing and future risks [41,56,57].This paper clusters the identified key features across sectoral frameworks into three overarching thematic areas: i) collaboration across sectors and levels of government; ii) societal engagement and participation, including those most vulnerable; and iii) proactive, long term and multi-hazard risk management encompassing both floods and droughts. Table 1 summarizes the key features and shortcomings identified through the narrative review and highlights and consolidates main thematic areas across sectoral governance frameworks that hold potential for informing the synergistic management of floods and droughts [20].

The synergistic management of floods and drought represent a complex challenge that necessitates an equally complex governance approach [89]. Building on the overarching thematic areas identified above, this paper seeks to further explore and conceptualize the change processes required to manage hydroclimatic risks synergistically. The analysis in the next section examines the role of overarching thematic areas in facilitating such transformation and identifies transformational pathways through which the synergistic management of floods and droughts might be advanced.

Transforming the governance of flood and drought risk management

The synergistic management of flood and drought risk is limited by the inability of current governance systems to change at the scope, depth and speed needed to address the complex challenges posed by hydroclimatic risks [26,27,36,42,43,90,91]. The majority of current adaptation efforts fall into the category of incremental change, which consists of small, partial and slow modifications that maintain the functioning of an existing system [27,29,92]. However, there is an ongoing discussion around the need for a higher order of change, that is transformative change, requiring in-depth, large and faster variations that fundamentally modify existing hydroclimatic risk management systems so they are able to deal with the impacts of climate change, especially those expected in high emission scenarios [18,28,54,91].

Discussing change in binary terms, incremental vs transformative, might not be fruitful conceptually and does not necessarily lead to a better understanding of the governance interventions needed to enable change [91]. For example, the IPCC considers a continuum between incremental and transformative change with no sharp division between them as both are deeply related, bring us closer to a common resilience objective, and are likely to continue occurring simultaneously [15,18]. The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) describes the term transformative change as: i) the aggregation or scaling up of limited interventions that individually do not exceed thresholds but together have transformative potential, ii) interventions only available when the there is no more room for incremental change; and iii) actions designed to address system failure [15].

Scholars like Termeer et al. (2017, 2024) have also challenged the rigid dichotomy between incremental and transformational change, which is based on assumptions related to the depth, scope and speed of change, introducing the concept of continuous transformational change. This concept refers to a process characterized by in-depth and sustained modifications to governance systems that enable new pathways for systemic and structural change [30,31,91,93]. Positioned between small-scale incremental change and large-scale radical change, continuous transformational change emphasizes the quality of continued change, rather than framing it within a binary of slow versus fast when referring to the speed of change [91,94]. Termeer and colleagues apply this concept to the governance interventions for climate change adaptation arguing that governing transformational change will require transformations of the governance systems themselves [91].

Transforming governance systems requires innovative approaches and the development of new governance practices that reshape power structures and institutional arrangements, reconfigure patterns of interaction to encourage collaboration, and challenge existing assumptions and mind-sets [27,29,43,91]. However, despite discussion on the characteristics of change, the existing scientific literature offers limited guidance on how to steer or facilitate the governance transformations required to leverage synergies in flood and drought risk management [92].

This section explores an innovative conceptual governance approach that builds on the overarching thematic areas emerging from the narrative review and the concept of continuous transformational change. It seeks to inform the necessary changes in institutional arrangements, interactions, and paradigms for the synergistic management of floods and droughts. This proposed governance approach focuses on three main transformative pathways: i) a shift of institutional arrangements from siloed sectoral management to interagency collaboration at the national level –referred to as a whole of government approach; ii) a reconfiguration of the patterns of interaction between national governments and society to foster efforts towards a shared resilience objective – referred to as a whole of society approach; and iii) a paradigm shift from treating floods and droughts as separate risks to understanding them as interconnected phenomena along a single hydroclimatic spectrum – referred to as the whole hydroclimatic spectrum. Table 2 outlines these proposed transformative pathways and illustrates how they align with the key dimensions of change (i.e., depth, scope and speed) offering a nuanced narrative of how transformation can be realized.

Download:

• PPT
  PowerPoint slide
• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Table 2. Proposed transformative pathways and their relation to key dimensions of change.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000417.t002

To illustrate how the three proposed transformative pathways might occur in practice, this paper draws on descriptive examples from flood and drought risk management in Spain. Each of the following sections introduces key concepts from the related literature to each proposed transformative pathway (i.e., whole of government, whole of society, and whole hydroclimatic spectrum) and applies these concepts in the illustrative example of Spain.

Whole of government

National governments are at the core of countries’ capacity to deal with current and future climate extremes [31,54]. However, no single government agency can effectively manage the complex and interconnected challenges posed by hydroclimatic risks in isolation. The term whole of government refers to the collaboration required among various government agencies to manage complex challenges. The concept operationalizes polycentricity from the perspective of national governments, understanding the different agencies as autonomous yet inter-linked decision centers and highlighting the need to align mandates and incentives to enable effective collaboration [34,35,89].

Governments have direct capacity to transform agencies and practices to facilitate increased collaboration towards a shared adaptation goal [31,95]. Whole of government approaches have been utilized by national governments as a way to organize internal collaboration to tackle wicked problems throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries [96]. More recently, the USA and Australian governments have utilized whole of government approaches to increase collaboration between agencies involved in responding to climate change [95,97].

Enhancing collaboration in practice requires a clear understanding of commonalities in governance structures, as well as strategies that have proven effective in driving transformative change [31,64]. While further practice and analysis are needed to identify the key enabling characteristics of whole of government approaches, particularly in the context of flood and drought risk management, some emerging practices show promise. For example, there is growing evidence that the periodic preparation of strategic national plans for water, disaster risk management and drought management can play a critical role in facilitating interagency collaboration [7]. These national strategic planning processes, often mandated by law, provide a structured opportunity for different agencies to convene to periodically and progressively enable changes in policies, laws, programs, regulations, funding and, interagency collaboration arrangements [64].

In Spain, there are key developments in place enabling continued change towards a whole of government effort for flood and drought risk management although the term itself has not been formally adopted. Most aspects related to floods and droughts are governed by the Spanish WRM and the DRM legal frameworks. Within this context, the 2001 Water Law and the 2015 Civil Protection Law both mandate the periodic preparation of national strategic plans for water resources and disaster risk management, requiring the involvement of agencies across multiple sectors [98–100]. However, the extent to which these periodic planning process effectively enable a whole of government approach remains to be fully determined.

On the WRM side, the law requires the National Hydrological Plan to serve two key functions: to periodically revise the national water sector strategy and approve and harmonize basin plans. Spain’s first National Hydrologic Plan, adopted in 2001, set out a national infrastructure-based water transfer strategy which generated strong stakeholder opposition. In 2005, a new administration revised the Plan, shifting its focus in favor of desalinization efforts [52,98,100,101]. Since then, no National Strategic Water Plan has been developed. Instead the focus has shifted to the targeted approval of updated river basin plans, without a formal revision of the overarching national water strategy. As a result, opportunities to advance transformative change toward increased inter-agency collaboration for flood and drought risk management remain largely unrealized.

On the DRM side, the national committee for civil protection approved Spain’s first National Civil Protection Strategy in 2019 which highlights flooding, and to a lesser extent drought, as significant national risks [102]. A National Flood Management Strategic Plan was previously adopted by the cabinet in 2011 [103]. Spain currently lacks a National Drought Management Strategic Plan, although a comprehensive drought observation program is coordinated at the national level. Table 3 summarizes the main findings stemming from the application of transformative pathways, including whole of government to the illustrative example of Spain.

Download:

• PPT
  PowerPoint slide
• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Table 3. Key Findings of Transformative Pathways in Spain.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000417.t003

While Spain has developed national strategic plans for water, civil protection and flood management, these efforts have not yet been periodically updated to fully enable and operationalize the transformations necessary for the different sectoral agencies to engage in a whole of government approach to flood and drought risk management [104]. The legal mandates to prepare national strategic plans with the participation of the different agencies represent an important first step, as they establish a periodic multisectoral process with the potential to enable deep, system-wide change. However, since periodic and synergized strategic national plans for WRM, DRM and drought are not yet a reality in Spain, a longer-term operationalization process is still needed to fully implement this transformative governance change.

Whole of society

While necessary, whole of government approaches are not enough, as national governments are unable to manage the increasing challenges posed by floods and droughts in isolation. Building resilience requires the active participation of citizens, civil society, vulnerable groups, local governments, and the scientific community, in addition to collaborative action at the national level [59,105]. Emerging empirical evidence suggests that more complex and diverse interaction patterns, including multilevel collaboration between national and local governments and non-state actors, are associated with a higher level of adaptive capacity [24,43].

Engaging the whole of society, requires national agencies to move beyond a purely technocratic culture and incorporate social expertise [7]. By granting technical and social expertise equal standing, agencies are better placed to dynamically and flexibly respond to society’s evolving needs in the face of changing hydroclimatic risks [106,107]. Further analysis is required to understand and enhance the multiple and complex interactions required to engage the whole of society in the synergistic management of floods and droughts.

Building on the premise that flood and drought management are a shared responsibility involving the whole of society, this section focuses on the role of national government as leaders in reconfiguring interaction patterns and enabling active collaboration with key partners, including local governments, citizens, vulnerable groups, and the scientific community. A clear distinction is made between national and local governments recognizing that their mandates, capacity and agendas may differ. We argue that national governments should engage local governments as indispensable partners, rather than as subordinates, to align efforts in hydroclimatic risk management [50,108]. The following subsections delve into the conceptual foundations of whole of society efforts and draw examples from how the Spanish national government engages with each relevant partner (i.e., local governments, citizens, vulnerable groups, and the scientific community) in the management of floods and droughts. Table 3 summarizes the main findings from the application of the whole of society transformative pathway to the illustrative example of Spain disaggregated by relevant partner.

Whole hydroclimatic spectrum

Globally, floods and drought continue to be largely managed in isolation despite representing interdependent ends of the same hydroclimatic spectrum [11]. Prevailing mental models in hydroclimatic risks management tend to focus on either floods or droughts [25,53]. Flood and drought risks are more complex than the binary framing of too much or too little water [9]. Hydroclimatic risks can have far-reaching impacts on ecosystems, water supply, energy generation, tourism, transport and infrastructure, to name a few [19,24]. According to the IPCC, many regions worldwide are expected to experience alternating periods of intense drought conditions and extreme flood events in the near future, further underscoring the need for their synergistic management [18].

Hydroclimatic hazards emerge from complex interactions among the climate, land and hydrologic systems [132]. Hydroclimatic risks arise from the dynamic interactions between hydroclimatic-related hazards, exposure, and the vulnerability of the affected human and ecological systems. Despite the increasing historical and current socio-economic and environmental impacts of floods and droughts, the dynamics resulting from their cascading, compounding, systematic, non-linear and long-lasting impacts are poorly understood, limiting their effective and synergistic management [85,133]. To better manage the entire hydroclimatic spectrum, it is essential to shift paradigms and further explore the dynamic interactions between floods and droughts as phenomena, as drivers of risk and impacts on society, and as the focus of complex governance systems.

The way floods and droughts are managed can either reduce or exacerbate risks, and may contribute to (mal)adaptation to climate change in the long run [134]. Some of the main challenges involved in better understanding the complex connections in the management of floods and droughts lie in the fact that negative impacts often emerge as unintended consequences identified ex-post, with the potential to lock in detrimental impacts ultimately leading to maladaptation [135,136].

On the positive side, a growing body of literature highlights the multiple synergies stemming from the combined management of floods and droughts, ranging from observation and modelling systems, to impact assessment to a better understanding of common drivers, such as infrastructure management [1,25]. A cornerstone to effectively managing hydroclimatic risks is the coordinated management of land and water, which requires the collaboration of not only water resources, disaster risk management and hydro-meteorological agencies but also agriculture and natural resources management [7,137,138]. Managing the entire hydroclimatic spectrum requires a fundamental transformation of hydroclimatic observation, land, water resources and disaster risk management systems, rather than mere adjustments or optimization [19,24]

Spain has a long tradition and profound knowledge in managing droughts and floods [139]. As outlined in previous sections, Spain has developed advanced flood and drought risk management systems, although their synergistic management remains conceptually and operationally limited. The water resources and disaster risk management national frameworks include clear yet mostly separate provisions for the management of floods and drought, with limited established guidance on how to leverage potential synergies. There are some elements in place that can facilitate key interactions, for example the legal mandate to generate flood and drought risk management plans at the basin level. However, implementation has yet to generate the expected synergies in the management of the entire hydroclimatic spectrum [104,140,141]. A more proactive effort to break silos comes from climate change adaptation legal and regulatory frameworks which often consider floods and droughts jointly and enable combined planning, investment, and observation programs [142,143]. Notably, the national government has developed key programs such as the Climate Change Adaptation and Environmental Impulse Plan, launched in 2015. The Impulse Plan promoted transformations towards the management of the entire hydroclimatic spectrum by fostering collaboration across national agencies, local governments, academia, citizens and the scientific community [144]. However, further efforts are required to radically change entrenched flood and drought risk management practices to progressively broaden and deepen the roles of government and society to enable transformative change in paradigms for the synergistic management of floods and droughts. Table 3 summarizes the main findings from the application of the whole hydroclimatic spectrum transformative pathway to the illustrative example of Spain.