Between 2002 and 2013, the city of La Plata, Argentina, was affected by flood events of varying strength, culminating in a disastrous flood in April 2013 when more than 80 people died. The city administration had been made aware of pre-existing factors that made residents more vulnerable and exposed to flooding. Yet, despite the city’s growth, the administration did not introduce more non-structural measures, such as land use controls, to adapt the city’s flood risk management strategy to the change. A process-tracing analysis of the process leading to this lack of adaptive capacity shows that what made the integration of more land use controls into the municipal’s strategy for flood risk management challenging goes beyond purely structural issues like missing coordination between responsible departments. Only by considering how dynamics like the path dependency of strategic documents, partial co-optation of the planning sector and psychological and political incentives impacted public officials at critical junctures, is it possible to show why responsible public actors did not use existing chances to adapt the trajectory of flood risk management in La Plata.