Abstract:The European Union (EU) Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires EU member states to produce and implement river basin management plans, which are to be designed and updated via participatory processes that inform, consult with, and actively involve all interested stakeholders. The assumption of the European Commission is that stakeholder participation, and institutional adaptation and procedural innovation to facilitate it, are essential to the effectiveness of river basin planning and, ultimately, the environmental impact of the Directive. We analyzed official documents and the WFD literature to compare implementation of the Directive in EU member states in the initial WFD planning phase (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009). Examining the development of participatory approaches to river basin management planning, we consider the extent of transformation in EU water governance over the period. Employing a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach, we map the implementation "trajectories" of 13 member states, and then provide a detailed examination of shifts in river basin planning and participation in four member states (Germany, Sweden, Poland and France) to illustrate the diversity of institutional approaches observed. We identify a general tendency towards increased, yet circumscribed, stakeholder participation in river basin management in the member states examined, alongside clear continuities in terms of their respective pre-WFD institutional and procedural arrangements. Overall, the WFD has driven a highly uneven shift to river basin-level planning among the member states, and instigated a range of efforts to institutionalize stakeholder involvement-often through the establishment of advisory groups to bring organized stakeholders into the planning process.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are inspired and supported by nature but designed by humans. Historically, governmental stakeholders have aimed to control nature using a top-down approach; more recently, environmental governance has shifted to collaborative planning. Polycentric governance and co-creation procedures, which include a large spectrum of stakeholders, are assumed to be more effective in the management of public goods than traditional approaches. In this context, NBS projects should benefit from strong collaborative governance models, and the European Union is facilitating and encouraging such models. While some theoretical approaches exist, setting-up the NBS co-creation process (namely co-design and co-implementation) currently relies mostly on self-organized stakeholders rather than on strategic decisions. As such, systematic methods to identify relevant stakeholders seem to be crucial to enable higher planning efficiency, reduce bottlenecks and time needed for planning, designing, and implementing NBS. In this context, this contribution is based on the analysis of 16 NBS and 359 stakeholders. Real-life constellations are compared to theoretical typologies, and a systematic stakeholder mapping method to support co-creation is presented. Rather than making one-fit-all statements about the “right” stakeholders, the contribution provides insights for those “in charge” to strategically consider who might be involved at each stage of the NBS project.

Scholars of environmental governance are increasingly intrigued by issues of scale. Efforts to institutionalise river basin management represent a pertinent exemplar, as they aspire to strengthen hydrological vis-à-vis political-administrative scales of governance. The EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) is one of the most ambitious policy initiatives worldwide to reconfigure water management planning around the hydrological scale of river basins. Whilst it is widely assumed that the WFD is rescaling water governance in Europe, few empirical studies have been conducted to ascertain how far this is the case, what scalar strategies and practices are emerging and to what effect. The paper addresses these open issues with a study analysing the multi-scalar actions of water authorities, water management organisations, local authorities and interest groups involved in implementing the WFD. It investigates how stakeholders are acting scalar from the local to the European scale and back to further their interests in the course of WFD implementation, focussing on the Wupper sub-basin in Germany. Drawing for conceptual insight on the human geography debate on the politics of scale and processes of rescaling, we demonstrate how all relevant stakeholders are increasingly working across scales to advance their interests but in very different ways, with different degrees of deliberation and to different effect. A typology of multi-scalar action is developed to interpret this diversity. The paper draws conclusions on how multi-scalar action is altering not only power relations between the actors but also the scalar configurations themselves.

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Nature-based solutions (NBS) for mitigating climate change are gaining popularity. The number of NBS is increasing, but research gaps still exist at the governance level. The objectives of this paper are (i) to give an overview of the implemented NBS for flood risk management and mitigation in Germany, (ii) to identify governance models that are applied, and (iii) to explore the differences between these models. The results of a hierarchical clustering procedure and a qualitative analysis show that while no one-size-fits-all governance model exists, polycentricism is an important commonality between the projects. The study concludes by highlighting the need for further research on traditional governance model reconversion and paradigm changes. We expect the findings to identify what has worked in the past, as well as what is important for the implementation of NBS for flood risk management in future projects.

This paper asks what lessons can be learned from experiences with coproduction in water governance. For this, we review a comprehensive corpus of articles in the field of water governance that relies on the term. We find that there are radically different understandings of what coproduction means in different branches of the water governance literature. Through this review, we demonstrate how and why coproduction needs to be analyzed for its political implications. Despite being timely and pressing, these questions are not addressed in a sufficient way by the scholarly debate on coproduction. In order to fill this knowledge gap, we first distinguish different historical traditions of coproduction and then explore their political implications along three questions: The “why?”, the “who?”, and the “how?”. We show that these questions find different answers not just between but also within different traditions of using the term. After describing and contrasting these variants, we conclude by summarizing the main lessons from our review and by identifying questions which call for future research.

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are currently promoted as a panacea for improving human-nature relations. Yet the way of amplifying and mainstreaming NbS beyond scientific demonstrator projects into policy contexts is still bearing shortcomings, in particular in the uncertain futures of a post-COVID-19 world. Successful NbS amplification may be achieved by (1) using multi-scalar action to balance differing interests and reconcile governance levels, (2) providing financial and other institutionalized incentives and strategies for integrated participation processes, (3) using appropriate governance and management scales effectively integrating mediators, (4) using opportunities for transformative change offered by crisis, and (5) learning from worldwide amplification experiences.

Infrastructures are key interfaces of urban resource use, connecting production to consumption, cities to their hinterland and energy to water and land use. They have, however, received scant attention in debates on nexus thinking in general, and the urban nexus in particular. Drawing on an emergent critical literature on the nexus in urban studies and science and technology studies, this article examines practices of (attempted) inter-sectoral infrastructure integration at the interface of urban wastewater treatment and regional energy provision in Germany. It analyses the nexus approaches and experiences of eight German cities / city-regions as so-called ‘flexibility providers’ in regional energy markets for electricity, gas and heating. It demonstrates how the practices of wastewater utilities operating in energy markets involve far more than technical adaptation, requiring in addition a major reordering of existing material, spatial and institutional configurations to both wastewater and energy systems. This is proving a deeply political process with important implications for our understanding of socio-technical transitions at the water-energy nexus.