Journal Article

Abstract

In the past flood defence projects in England were funded largely from the national budget. In 2011, Partnership Funding (PF) was introduced as a new approach to the financing of projects to reduce flood and coastal erosion risks. The new policy encourages the sharing of project costs between national and local public sources and uses an economic assessment to provide guidance on the level of funding that should be sought from third parties. By making explicit the beneficiaries of flood protection policies, economic valuation might, increasingly, affect not only the concrete actions introduced to meet policy objectives (the "what" of policy making) but also the actors implementing these measures (the "who") and the sharing of the financial burden among the affected parties (the "how"). We conduct an indepth policy review that combines qualitative analysis of policy relevant information (including legislation, guidance notes and information on specific projects) with quantitative analysis of (publicly available) project data. Our analysis shows that although since PF was introduced local contributions have increased com-pared to previous years, the majority of funding still comes from central government. We suggest that disadvantaged areas should be better targeted