Flood resilience is often framed as an engineering or institutional challenge. But what if the real bottleneck is communication?
At IRNOP 2026 (International Research Network on Organizing by Projects), Dr. Zhaowen Liu from the ResilientHydroTwin project team presented research that shifts the focus from data and infrastructure to the social dynamics of how flood risk information travels, and where it gets stuck.
The paper, "The need for a common language in flood resilience," draws on stakeholder interviews and expert workshops conducted in Rotterdam. The findings reveal that actors across governance levels — engineers, urban planners, water authorities, and community groups — often work with the same data but interpret it through fundamentally different professional lenses. As one practitioner put it during the research: "We are looking at the same map, but we see different problems."
The study identifies three types of mediators: informal networks, participatory co-production processes, and digital tools, that can help bridge these divides, but only when deliberately designed for inclusion rather than technical efficiency alone.
IRNOP 2026 brought together researchers from across the project management and governance fields, offering a valuable space to connect this work with broader debates on inter-organisational collaboration and knowledge integration in complex systems.
Strengthening flood resilience requires not just technical infrastructure, but also investing in communicative capacity. This is at the heart of the ResilientHydroTwin project: developing a digital twin that is not built for stakeholders, but with them. Because no matter how advanced the tool, its value depends entirely on whether the right people can understand, trust, and act on what it shows.