Water Management Across Borders, Scales and Sectors: How to Address Recent Developments and Future Challenges in Water Policy Analysis?

For decades, Water Management research has been one of the core domains in Environmental Policy Analysis. Policy Process, Design and Evaluation Scholars have considerably contributed to new developments in the field: through the analysis of water regulation and management over time, space, sectors, and scales evidence about integrated and basin-related approaches was enhanced. Today, after the introduction of the European Water Framework Directive and the broad recognition of the principle of Integrated Water Resource Management, water policy analysis and resource management face new challenges. This section offers a platform to water policy analysts and governance scholars dealing with recent developments in water management and regulation. Crucial questions can read as follows: How to define the appropriate scale of catchment areas? How to design integrated processes and implement collaborative management forms? Does integration lead to enhanced participation and better outputs? What impact do public-private management forms have on water pricing and quality? How does transboundary water management influence domestic policy processes and outputs? Besides giving an overview of the state of the art in water policy analysis, the additional goal of this section is to collectively think about further research developments in the field. Therefore, we invite scholars that contribute to water policy analysis and environmental governance literature relying on interdisciplinary, new and innovative concepts, methods and empirical research.