Beyond engineering resilience: a systems-based collaborative planning framework for flood resilience

Increasing flood risk, exacerbated by climate change and rapid urbanisation, has revealed the significant limitations of traditional ‘predict-and-control’ frameworks for flood resilience planning. Despite global policy discussions promoting flood resilience, implementation often conflates it with conventional flood protection. In practice, this results in static engineering investments that focus narrowly on resisting immediate hazard impacts, while neglecting the recovery and adaptive capacities that distinguish flood resilience from conventional flood protection and are essential for reducing vulnerability and injustice over time. Synthesising recent evidence (2015–2025), this paper explains why engineering-centred approaches still persist in flood resilience planning, highlighting reinforcing mechanisms in institutions, professional practice, finance, and governance. Building on socioecological and sociotechnical resilience scholarship, it then proposes a systems-based collaborative planning approach that operationalises resilience as a systemic capacity rather than an attribute of individual assets. The framework integrates the theory of complexity (also referred to as Systems thinking) with collective action to map feedback loops between technical infrastructure, power relations and social learning, and explicitly repositions engineering expertise as a technical resource within a collaborative planning cycle. The paper concludes that genuine flood resilience requires justice-informed and uncertainty-aware planning that deliberately strengthens communities’ capacities to absorb, recover, and adapt to floods, and is co-produced with affected communities rather than delivered solely through engineered physical reinforcements.