Numerous risks threaten modern society. Some are new, while others have existed since the beginning of time, but none have been governed on a societal level since their inception. Despite the abundance of literature addressing the governance of various risks, the processes by which they become governable in the first place have gotten little attention. As a result, this paper aims to improve our knowledge of how risk is governmentalised in modern liberal democracies. It empirically examines the recent problematisation of flood risk mitigation in a specific area to investigate the underlying processes of such governmentalisation. The research employs a mixed theoretical perspective, based on governmentality and new institutionalism, to a case study of the governing of flood risk mitigation in Lomma municipality and the Höje catchment area in Southern Sweden.
The paper mixes structural and interpretative methods. Data were collected through 217 interviews with all actors actively contributing to flood risk mitigation in the area, together with numerous documentary sources. The findings reveal remarkable spatial, temporal, and functional fragmentation in the regime of practices mitigating flood risk, a concentration of responsibility for flood risk mitigation in municipal administrations, and an escalating penetration and diffusion of the market in its governing. Four constituent processes of governmentalisation can be identified. Reductivisation refers to the process of conceptualising the complex problem in smaller, disconnected parts. Projectification captures how the problem is addressed through piecemeal projects. Responsibilisation is the process by which responsibility is transferred to an actor with less power and who lacks appropriate resources, and commodification refers to seeing the solution to the problem as the aggregation of standardised modules that can be sourced on the market. While these processes are fundamental for flood risk to become governable in the first place, they are intrinsically linked and combine to seriously undermine flood risk mitigation. This nexus may be a general feature of the governmentalisation of risk in advanced liberal democracies, albeit to various degrees and in different ways depending on the penetration and diffusion of neoliberalism.