Impact of the 2023 Emilia-Romagna Floods on the Development of Integrated Flood Risk Mitigation Strategies in the Region

This thesis analyzes whether and how the May 2023 Emilia-Romagna floods reshaped the region’s integrated flood-risk mitigation strategies. It employs a qualitative document analysis of two key flood plan documents, the pre-flood Piano di Gestione del Rischio di Alluvioni (2021) and the post-flood Piano Speciale (2025), and applies thematic coding deductively in ATLAS.ti, generating five codes grouped into four overarching themes. These four themes structure the findings. First, the 2023 floods served as a focusing event and catalyst, opening a policy window for emergency-driven regulatory reform. Second, they exposed fragmented risk governance, revealing misaligned infrastructures and institutional silos that the Piano Speciale directly addressed through mandated coordination and short-term financing. Third, the policy stream evolved toward genuinely integrated mitigation, combining hard infrastructure, ecological measures, and land-use planning within basin-scale frameworks. Fourth...Show moreThis thesis analyzes whether and how the May 2023 Emilia-Romagna floods reshaped the region’s integrated flood-risk mitigation strategies. It employs a qualitative document analysis of two key flood plan documents, the pre-flood Piano di Gestione del Rischio di Alluvioni (2021) and the post-flood Piano Speciale (2025), and applies thematic coding deductively in ATLAS.ti, generating five codes grouped into four overarching themes. These four themes structure the findings. First, the 2023 floods served as a focusing event and catalyst, opening a policy window for emergency-driven regulatory reform. Second, they exposed fragmented risk governance, revealing misaligned infrastructures and institutional silos that the Piano Speciale directly addressed through mandated coordination and short-term financing. Third, the policy stream evolved toward genuinely integrated mitigation, combining hard infrastructure, ecological measures, and land-use planning within basin-scale frameworks. Fourth, new institutional mechanisms, such as extraordinary commissioner powers and binding development freezes, consolidated political commitment and embedded reforms into formal structures. Framed by Dolan’s (2019) revision of Kingdon’s (1985) multiple streams framework, the discussion demonstrates that change unfolded through sequential partial couplings: initial problem-political convergence catalyzed by crisis, followed by problem-policy linkages, and finally policy-political embedding. This thesis thus contributes a nuanced account of how extreme events can generate stratified, incremental policy integration in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy.Show less

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Impact of the 2023 Emilia-Romagna Floods on the Development of Integrated Flood Risk Mitigation Strategies in the Region