Conservatives and Champions: River Managers and the River Restoration Discourse in the United Kingdom

Abstract

We discuss two contrasting discourses of environmental management for the management of rivers and floodplain environments in the United Kingdom. Through the 1990s a long-established flood defence discourse gave way to a new discourse of river and floodplain restoration. We draw on qualitative interviews with river managers to set out these discourses, and consider the engagement between them. We consider particularly the way in which flood defence engineers have resisted and gradually been won over to aspects of the new restoration discourse, and the role of champions in that discourse transition.