Drought Governance in Transition: a Case Study of the Meuse River Basin in the Netherlands

Abstract

The Netherlands is internationally renowned for its flood risk management, but three consecutive dry years between 2018–2020 fuelled the debate on how to deal with future drought risk. Drought governance in the Netherlands is still in its infancy. The increased sense of urgency has led many scholars and policy makers to call for transitions towards a more anticipatory drought governance which enables transformative actions in an adequate and timely manner. Whilst transitions have been studied before, few have looked at governance systems, and even fewer on the processes that can steer the direction and speed of governance transitions in the future. This paper adopts a novel perspective by combining theories on mechanisms and transitions to analyse future governance transitions. The aim of this study is to identify the key mechanisms that have potential to steer and/or accelerate transitions in Dutch drought governance. This study focusses on the upper part of the Dutch Meuse River basin. Using a document analysis, expert interviews, and focus group discussions, the findings show that five underlying micro-level mechanisms are critical to steer and accelerate transitions. These include social learning, shared problem perception, administrative courage and leadership, persistency, and institutionalisation. The novel transition-mechanistic conceptual approach adopted in this study offers a starting point for other studies that wish to obtain a better understanding of underlying processes in a transition.

The dynamic identification mechanism research of drought based on process description

“…In addition, Brockhoff et al (2022) used a new mechanism-based approach to analyze the future of the Dutch drought governance system, and argued that multifaceted research on mechanisms can accelerate and guide future management of drought. The new dynamic identification mechanism based on the drought process proposed in this paper can combine the historical evaluation of drought with real-time feedback information, closely track the development trend of drought and improve the timeliness of drought action.…”

Towards Design Principles for Good Multi-Level Drought Risk Governance: Some Lessons from the Rhine Basin

“…Water governance in northwestern Europe has traditionally focused on flood risk prevention and management and on improving water quality [1]. However, three consecutive dry summers (2018, 2019, and 2020) also showed that governance not only has to deal with too much water, but also with too little.…”

Investigating meteorological wet and dry transitions in the Dutch Meuse River basin

“…The Netherlands is internationally renowned for its flood risk management, but drought events between 2018 and 2022 have shed light on the need to manage drought risk as well (Brockhoff et al, 2022;Nunez Sanchez and van Beek, 2022;Bartholomeus et al, 2023). Frequent precipitation during the year feeds the country's freshwater reserves and the Rhine and Meuse rivers that flow through it (Brockhoff et al, 2022).…”

“…The Netherlands is internationally renowned for its flood risk management, but drought events between 2018 and 2022 have shed light on the need to manage drought risk as well (Brockhoff et al, 2022;Nunez Sanchez and van Beek, 2022;Bartholomeus et al, 2023). Frequent precipitation during the year feeds the country's freshwater reserves and the Rhine and Meuse rivers that flow through it (Brockhoff et al, 2022). The southern and eastern regions of the Netherlands, like the Meuse River basin region, have a higher dependence on precipitation due to their higher elevation compared to the river level (Philip et al, 2020, see Figure 2B).…”