Flood risk and land-use governance in Quebec, Canada: Fifty years of crises and institutional reform

Over the past fifty years, Quebec’s flood risk governance has undergone successive reforms driven by major disasters, from the floods of 1974 and 1976 to those of 2017 and 2019. Drawing on legislative archives, policy documents, cartographic records, and media sources, this paper reconstructs how these critical junctures reshaped institutions, from the first Canada-Quebec floodplain agreements to the recent transitional regime and forthcoming third-generation maps. Using a historical institutionalist framework combined with insights from political ecology, we examine how crises have acted as catalysts for reform while also reinforcing path dependencies. Early hazard-based approaches focused on probabilistic mapping and infrastructure defence, while later initiatives introduced land-use restrictions, standardized cartographic methods, and eventually risk-based models integrating hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. Recent reforms further expand this scope to include adaptation and river mobility, supported by high-resolution LiDAR mapping and watershed-scale planning. Yet major challenges persist, including regulatory rigidity, tensions between provincial norms and local contexts, and uneven attention to social vulnerability, even if ongoing reforms begin to address some of these gaps. Through a political ecology lens, these shifts reveal how regulatory change intersects with power, equity, and knowledge: who defines risk, whose expertise prevails, and how costs and restrictions are distributed across territories. Quebec’s evolving trajectory highlights both the opportunities and limits of event-driven reform while disasters accelerate innovation, they can also entrench uneven governance outcomes. By situating Quebec within broader debates on adaptive risk governance and resilience, this study offers transferable lessons for jurisdictions facing climate-induced flood risk. • Fifty years of crisis have Quebec’s flood governance trajectory. • Recent reforms signal a shift toward integrated, risk–based governance. • LiDAR mapping and river mobility zones redefine regulatory boundaries. • Past policies produced persistent territorial and social vulnerabilities. • Equity and municipal capacity drive the effectiveness of new rules.