A.M. Keessen

EU Water Governance: Striking the Right Balance between Regulatory Flexibility and Enforcement?

Considering the challenges and threats currently facing water management and the exacerbation of uncertainty by climate change, the need for flexible yet robust and legitimate environmental regulation is evident. The European Union took a novel approach toward sustainable water resource management with the passage of the EU Water Framework Directive in 2000. The Directive promotes sustainable water use through long-term protection of available water resources, progressively reduces discharges of hazardous substances in ground and surface waters, and mitigates the effects of floods and droughts. The lofty goal of achieving good status of all waters requires strong adaptive capacity, given the large amounts of uncertainty in water management. Striking the right balance between flexibility in local implementation and robust and enforceable standards is essential to promoting adaptive capacity in water governance, yet achieving these goals simultaneously poses unique difficulty. Applied resilience science reveals a conceptual framework for analyzing the adaptive capacity of governance structures that includes multiple overlapping levels of control or coordination, information flow horizontally and vertically, meaningful public participation, local capacity building, authority to respond to changed circumstances, and robust monitoring, system feedback, and enforcement. Analyzing the Directive through the lens of resilience science, we highlight key elements of modern European water management and their contribution to the resilience of the system and conclude that the potential lack of enforcement and adequate feedback of monitoring results does not promote managing for resilience. However, the scale-appropriate governance aspects of the EU approach promotes adaptive capacity by enabling vertical and horizontal information flow, building local capacity, and delegating control at multiple relevant scales.

The Concept of Resilience from a Normative Perspective: Examples from Dutch Adaptation Strategies

Both in academic literature and political practice, resilience is becoming a central evaluative concept for assessing climate adaptation policies. This makes sense because society’s main challenge in an altering the environment is to adapt to the inevitable changes. However, applying the concept of resilience to devise adaptation strategies reveals that social-ecological resilience acquires different meanings depending on the social context. There is no straightforward application of resilience. In this contribution, it will be argued that giving meaning to the concept of resilience in adaptation strategies requires making normative choices. These choices concern whether there is a public interest in adaptation, the distribution of private and public responsibilities, and striking a balance between individual rights and general interests. Because these normative choices can be questioned and revised, it is important that they are made explicit to enable a democratic debate on the direction that adaptation strategies should take. Simply referring to the concept of resilience in an adaptation strategy does not suffice, but occludes this discussion. Through formulating and applying a condensed scheme of politico-theoretical approaches that underpin diverging adaptation approaches, this contribution reveals the various underlying normative assumptions and explicates the relevant political choices. Three Dutch adaptation strategies serve as empirical examples. They illustrate the importance of the societal context in giving meaning to resilience in the development of adaptation strategies.

Solidarity in water management

Adaptation to climate change can be an inclusive and collective, rather than an individual effort. The choice for collective arrangements is tied to a call for solidarity. We distinguish between one-sided (assisting community members in need) and two-sided solidarity (furthering a common interest) and between voluntary and compulsory solidarity. We assess the strength of solidarity as a basis for adaptation measures in six Dutch water management case studies. Traditionally, Dutch water management is characterized by compulsory two-sided solidarity at the water board level. Since the French times, the state is involved through compulsory national solidarity contributions to avoid societal disruption by major floods. In so far as this furthers a common interest, the contributions qualify as two-sided solidarity, but if it is considered assistance to flood-prone areas, they also qualify as one-sided solidarity. Although the Delta Programme explicitly continues on this path, our case studies show that solidarity continues to play an important role in Dutch water management in the process of adapting to a changing climate, but that an undifferentiated call for solidarity will likely result in debates over who should pay what and why. Such discussions can lead to cancellation or postponement of adaptation measures, which are not considered to be in the common interest or result in an increased reliance on local solidarity.

Governance of the Sponge City Programme in China with Wuhan as a case study

Abstract In 2015, China’s national government initiated a Sponge City Programme to address its urban flood issues. A sponge city is a city built around the concept of managing water in an ecologically sustainable way. The intention is to improve urban resilience through rainwater capture, storage and use. This article applies a four-mode governance framework to analyze the programme. It identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the programme implementation and provides recommendations.

Implementation arrangements for climate adaptation in the Netherlands: characteristics and underlying mechanisms of adaptive governance

Adaptation to climate change is a rapidly emerging policy domain. Over the last decade we have witnessed many attempts to enhance the climate robustness of agriculture, urban development, water systems, and nature to an increase in flood and drought risks due to a higher variability in rainfall patterns and sea level rise. In the vulnerable Dutch delta, regional authorities have developed adaptation measures that deal with flood risk, the availability of fresh water, subsidence, and salt water intrusion. In view of all the uncertainties that surround climate change, scientists emphasize that it should be possible to make changes when conditions change or insights evolve. The concept of adaptive governance has been introduced to facilitate the process of climate adaptation. Adaptive governance requires the availability of governance arrangements that facilitate adaptiveness by being flexible to enable adjustment. Although flexible arrangements for adaptation to climate change make sense from an adaptive governance perspective, from a more bureaucratic, political, and legal perspective, there might be good reasons to make arrangements as solid and robust as possible. In this article we answer the question to what extent the arrangements used to implement various adaptation measures are really adaptive and what mechanisms play a role in obstructing the accomplishment of adaptive arrangements. By analyzing and comparing nine adaptation cases, dealing with different climate issues, and the arrangements used to implement them from both a governance and a legal perspective, we are able to get more detailed insight into the main characteristics of the selected arrangements, their degree of adaptiveness, and the main hampering mechanisms for the creation or functioning of adaptive arrangements.

The Need for Flexibility and Differentiation in the Protection of Vulnerable Areas in EU Environmental Law: The Implementation of the Nitrates Directive in the Netherlands

The Nitrates Directive (91/676/EEC) offers EU Member States the unique choice to apply the nitrate regime in either designated areas or on their entire territory. The Netherlands has opted for a whole territory approach but is tempted to change this policy. This article investigates the legal options of the Netherlands to switch from a whole territory approach to a designated area approach. It also investigates two alternative possibilities to create a more area-based implementation of the Nitrates Directive in the Netherlands within a whole territory approach. The alternatives are (i) a further differentiation of the current manure policy and (ii) the possibility to integrate the implementation of the Nitrates Directive and the Water Framework Directive. The results of the research are placed in a European perspective.

In search of a European legislative approach to adaptation to climate change

The European Union has started to plan for adaptation to climate change. It is acting on the IPCC Assessments reports warning that climate change is already happening. Warming is evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global sea levels. And while there is no conclusive evidence, extreme events like the 2003 heatwave in Europe and hurricane Sandy in New York City in 2012 appear to be linked to climate change. As science now stands, the increase of the global average temperature is concluded to be very likely caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. In view of the potential impacts of climate change, it is obvious that mitigation is essential. However, it is controversial how aggressive mitigation efforts should beand who should bear them. Hence not enough resources might be invested in abating greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, even if humanity were able to halt emissions and stabilise the current greenhouse gas concentrations in the near future, warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries, due to the timescales and feedbacks. Therefore, mitigation should be complemented by adaptation. Both the Commission and the Council endorsed the idea that climate change policies need to have two legs: mitigation and adaptation. The EU already has a mitigation policy and has attempted to lead in setting mitigation targets. By contrast, the EU has been slow in developing an adaptation strategy. This difference might be an issue of scale.

The Legal Instruments for the control of emissions of medicines for human and veterinary use, advies in opdracht van het RIVM

ion of drinking water in the Member States, OJ 1975, L194/34, amended by Directive 79/869. See extensively Van Rijswick 2008b, p. 132141. 132 ECJ Case C-60/01, ECR 2002, I-05679; ECJ, Case C-266/99, ECR 2001, I-01981; ECJ, Case C-56/90, ECR 1993, I-04109; ECJ, Case C-92/96, ECR 1998, I-00505; ECJ, Case C-337/89, ECR 1992, I-06103; ECJ, Case C316/00, ECR 2002, I-10527, ECJ, Case C-147/07.