The restoration of river environments has been of growing importance to river management and planning in the UK. The extension of ecological restoration to floodplains as well as river channels is more complex, partly because of the range of stakeholders and the diversity of relevant management...

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...