Improving society's ability to prepare for, respond to and recover from flooding requires integrated, anticipatory flood risk management (FRM) . However, most countries still focus their efforts on responding to flooding events if and when they occur rather than addressing their current and future vulnerability to flooding. Flood insurance is one mechanism that could a more ex-ante approach to risk by supporting risk reduction activities. This paper uses an adapted version of Easton's System

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... ory to investigate the role of insurance for FRM in Germany and England. We introduce an anticipatory FRM framework, which allows to consider flood insurance as part of a broader policy field. We analyse if and how flood insurance can catalyse a change towards a more anticipatory approach to FRM. In particular we consider insurance's role in influencing five key components of an anticipatory FRM: risk knowledge, prevention through better planning, property-level protection measures, structural protection and preparedness (for response). We find that in both countries FRM is still a reactive, event-driven process, while anticipatory FRM remains underdeveloped. However, collaboration between insurers and FRM decision-makers has already been successful, for example in improving risk knowledge and awareness, while in other areas insurance acts as a disincentive for more risk reduction action. In both countries there is evidence that insurance can play a significant role in encouraging anticipatory FRM, but this remains underutilized. Effective collaboration between insurers and government, should not be seen as a cost, but as an investment to secure future insurability through flood resilience. Key points The importance of anticipatory flood risk management, with an enhanced focus on risk reduction, is increasing, but remains underdeveloped. Flood insurance can play a significant role in encouraging anticipatory flood risk management, but this remains underutilized. Collaboration between insurers and government is not a cost, but an investment to secure insurability through better flood resilience. Accepted Article remains somewhat unclear. One FRM mechanism often considered as a possible catalyst for a more strategic, ex-ante approach to flood risk is insurance (Aerts and Botzen, 2011; Surminski, 2014) . At its core, insurance is a financial instrument, offering the transfer of a risk from one party to another for the payment of a premium. From a socio-economic perspective it offers a more effective way of addressing the costs of disasters than relying on (governmental) post-disaster assistance: if correctly implemented insurance delivers risk spreading over space and time; risk smoothing; faster and more efficient reconstruction; certainty about post-disaster support; and can reduce immediate welfare losses and consumption reductions (see for example Hallegatte, 2011; Brainard, 2008; Von Peter et al., 2012) . However, truly catastrophic risks may exceed the capacity of the industry and will always fall back on the state -an important consideration, particularly as rising risk levels might render insurance unviable without strong risk management and adaptation efforts, thus creating more demand for government disaster assistance (Ermoliev et. al. 2000; Botzen et. al. 2010; Jongman et. al. 2014; Jenkins et. al. 2017 ). Concepts such as risk layering offer an economic analysis of how different tools, including direct assistance with the construction of resilient infrastructure and more risk protection, can be combined. This also underlines why insurance should not be seen as a stand-alone financial risk transfer, but as a tool that interacts with the overall risk management while also possibly shaping risk governance and influence risk behaviour: at least in theory, insurance can send signals to encourage more risk reduction and prevention, such as flood proofing of buildings and property, retrofitting of houses, local flood protection measures, and building larger scale flood protection schemes (Bräuninger et al., 2011; Aerts and Botzen, 2011; Filatova, 2013; Kunreuther and Michel-Kerjan, 2009; and National Research Council. 2015 as an example for efforts in the US). Efforts have been made to explore this through a system-approach, as outlined by Ermoliev et al. (2000) , who explore the role of system approaches models and accompanying decision support systems in achieving a more integrated use of insurance and risk reduction (Ermoliev et al., 2000) . This has been enhanced with an emerging body of socio-economic analysis that offers insights on how to combine and utilize different FRM methods and financial instruments, for an overview see Mechler et al. (2016) .