Like many other countries, Germany aims to create flood retention areas via polders and dike relocations. As these measures require access to diverse plots, land acquisition is clearly a challenging task for the responsible water authorities. A revision to the national water law in 2017 introduced several new instruments for land acquisition, i.e. pre-emption rights and regulations to ease expropriation, in order to facilitate the realization of flood protection infrastructure. Nonetheless, interviews with representatives of Germany’s various water authorities have shown that, in practice, these new instruments are widely neglected in favor of established forms of land acquisition such as strategic land banking and familiar instruments of land consolidation. This contribution explores the reasons for this low uptake of the new instruments. The study also reveals that in terms of land management, there is considerable unclarity in regard to the management of land within controlled flood polders, in the dike foreland (floodplains) and between first and second dike lines, in particular which instruments are best suited to achieve practicable solutions.

像许多其他国家一样，德国的目标是通过田和堤防迁移来创建防洪区。由于这些措施需要进入不同的地块，因此征地显然是负责任的水务部门的一项艰巨任务。2017年对国家水法的修订引入了几项新的土地征用工具，即优先购买权和减轻征用的法规，以促进防洪基础设施的实现。尽管如此，对德国各水务部门代表的采访表明，实际上，这些新工具被广泛忽视，而倾向于建立既有的土地收购形式，例如战略性土地储备和熟悉的土地合并工具。这项贡献探讨了新仪器使用率低的原因。