Due to climate change, the risk of flooding is increasing with potentially severe consequences on highly populated and economically developed coastal zones. Storm surge barriers protect against such events with the critical task of closing during extreme weather conditions to prohibit the propagation of water. This highlights the importance of maintaining the high reliability of these structures and the challenge to reach this goal for rarely operated and unique infrastructures. To deal with this challenge, the study creates a foundation to set an asset management approach for storm surge barriers or assets with similar characteristics. This is done by studying the case of The Netherlands with the aim to [1] describe the asset management approach, [2] identify key features of the approach, [3] investigate the connection between these features and the characteristics of the barriers, and [4] conclude the influence of the characteristics on the establishment of an asset management approach.