Justice in EU groundwater governance: an institutionalism perspective

Groundwater accounts for 65% of drinking water in the European Union (EU) making it a central issue for water governance. The climate crisis leads to increased water demands in many regions with at the same time decreasing availability of water. This challenges distribution and allocation of groundwater resources with strong justice implications. Formal institutions such as EU policies, or other informal rules and norms guide this distribution and influence which actor groups have the possibility to access water. Environmental justice concepts often center around distributional, procedural and recognitional justice. In the context of research on water governance, this means examining how water is distributed, understanding the processes governing this distribution, and determining which groups have a voice and are recognized in both the distribution and procedural aspects. This paper aims to conceptualize justice in groundwater governance for Europe applying an institutionalism perspective. Therefore, we conducted a systematic literature review and investigated which conceptualizations and manifestations of justice are relevant in institutional research on groundwater governance. We centered the review on the European Union, as here groundwater is governed under a common institutional framework and still remains understudied in comparison to research on justice in water governance in the Global South. The findings showcase that institutional research on groundwater governance in the EU often only implicitly includes justice dimensions in their analysis. If addressed explicitly, justice is mostly discussed along the lines of participation and thus procedural justice. Research on the distributional dimension nearly exclusively focuses on the sector of agriculture often being combined with a critique of market-based governance modes or of capitalist economic practices. Interestingly, recognitional dimensions of justice, e.g. the recognition of marginalized or underrepresented groups, are hardly content of the institutional research of groundwater governance in the European Union. Overall the results highlight that justice issues are integral to the forming of institutions in the EU and yet only some dimensions of justice are targeted in current institutional research. This helps to identify existing research strands as well as gaps in the institutional research agenda for water justice in the EU.