Economic Drivers for ‘Room for the River’

This paper is part of the Freude am Fluss (FaF) project. The FaF project is focused on the opportunities of changing water management regimes for alternative spatial planning, flood-awareness and new economic development. It is a co-operation between German, French and Dutch knowledge institutes and universities and government departments. A key component of FaF is the active incorporation of all river basin stakeholders into the design and decision making processes around alternative spatial planning, the so-called Joint Planning Approach (JPA). The Joint Planning Approach in FAF incorporates the thinking that the performance of water systems has an ecological, social and economic dimension. It assists the capturing of the total economic value of innovative regional planning by measuring the economic value realized by managing the multi-functional dimensions of water systems. The JPA is supported by various documents that elaborate on specific important elements. One of the elements of JPA is the economic base of the projects, in other words, the economic drivers for the realistion of ‘Room for the River’.