This paper addresses the role of changing policy imperatives in multi-level governance of complex water challenges. Recent droughts in Europe (such as in Spain during 2008, Spain and Portugal in 2017, Germany in 2018, and Poland in 2019), added a crucial need for the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD), to consider overall water quantity and availability. The paper interrogates the ability of the WFD, a case study of regional multi-level governance, to adapt to the challenge of drought.
The paper uses EU and member state reports as evidence to examine the changing nature of water governance in Europe over the last two decades. The WFD was approved in 2000 with the aims of limiting pollution and actively restoring degraded water bodies. The original legislation saw droughts as a cause for exempting water bodies from quality surveillance due to the nature of temporary stress imposed. As a reflection of member state adaptation to intensified droughts, however, the fifth implementation report in 2019 finds that half of EU states see drought as a significant feature for water management and have put national drought plans in place.
Under a multi-level governance model that devolved considerable authority to member states, the WFD called for integration within national legislation, and included iterative rounds of river basin planning and reporting. The WFD allowed member states to choose the means of monitoring and implementing policies to ensure the “good status” of water bodies (Voulvoulis et al, 2016). In the policy evaluation literature, resulting uncertainty over water quality outcomes, both in failing ecological status and chemical condition, initially seemed the greatest shortcoming of the WFD (Sigel et al., 2010). This paper builds on the past two decades of evaluation literature to include drought as an unanticipated challenge in the original text of the WFD.
The gradual inclusion of drought as a challenge to water governance was driven by member states, and not at the direction and visioning of the original legislation. An important part of this process was that river basin planning was required under the WFD, which prompted states to consider how droughts directly affect the transboundary nature of water availability. Now, unprompted by the original WFD, many member states consider drought in their national water legislation. With regard to including droughts as a new challenge, the redeeming feature of the WFD has been the flexibility derived from devolving authority to member states. Through flexible implementation, states have innovated their water plans. The paper contributes to the general literature on multi-level governance, then, to suggest that though flexibility is associated with uncertainty, it also allows implementing units the freedom to address unanticipated challenges, especially when inter-jurisdictional coordination is built into the policy process.
Sigel, K., Klauer, B., & Pahl-Wostl, C. (2010). Conceptualising uncertainty in environmental decision-making: the example of the EU water framework directive. Ecological Economics, 69(3), 502-510.
Voulvoulis, N., Arpon, K. D., & Giakoumis, T. (2017). The EU Water Framework Directive: From great expectations to problems with implementation. Science of the Total Environment, 575, 358-366.
