Summary

Flood Risk Management (FRM) calls for stakeholders from multiple technical and social spheres to plan and implement policies and actions to manage flooding successfully. To work effectively across boundaries of knowledge, practice, priority, scale, institutions, and language created by such interdisciplinary or inter-stakeholder work, it is often necessary to employ intermediaries to create communication pathways between groups and spaces.

Intermediaries (also sometimes referred to as mediators or boundary spanners) are responsible for managing boundaries in such a way that multiple actors are able to communicate effectively with limited ambiguity or frustration. Sometimes, intermediaries enable two actors to come together who would usually not interact. For FRM, knowledge and experiences should ideally be brought together collaboratively and smoothly, whilst accounting for the diversity of perspectives and priorities between stakeholders involved.

Intermediaries may be organizations of humans, e.g., a public communications department; or objects, e.g., a computer model, website, or maps. Recognizing the utility of objects as intermediaries is important for understanding the multiplicity of mechanisms used to communicate FRM between experts and nonspecialist publics.

Charting how intermediaries bridge different boundaries, we see the diversity and utility of their work. Inspecting the construction of boundary objects as intermediaries allows the actors involved in their creation and definition to be identified and analyzed. This is important as it may contribute an understanding of how just and representative FRM decision making is.

Since the 1980s, various academic literatures from science and technology studies (STS) to organizational studies have addressed the role of intermediaries and mediators, particularly in relation to business management, computer sciences, and biomedicine. However, in FRM where risk analysis and communication is king, discussing how to manage pertinent and credible transboundary information is also important.