Werner Jann, Bastian Jantz, Alexander Kuehne, Lena Schulze-Gabrechten

• In 2013, large floods affected Germany heavily. The natural disaster transcended jurisdictional and organisational boundaries, necessitating a coordinative effort by disaster relief forces and their administrative and political leadership. In the aftermath, politicians and experts praised the improvement of the German system of crisis management, also in direct comparison with the response to the last German “flood of the century” of 2002. This chapter takes a public policy and organisational perspective to analyse the German disaster relief governance throughout all four crisis management phases. By highlighting the central features of the German governance arrangements and the main organisational changes implemented in reaction to the previous flood in 2002, we find that Whole-of-Government approaches are increasingly used by the federal and Länder government.