The politics of multi-scalar action in river basin management: Implementing the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD)

Abstract

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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“…issue definition, including problem framing and spatial scale, availability of resources, and decision-making processes). This acknowledgement facilitates an important link with critical human geography literature on the social and political construction of scale in environmental governance (Moss and Newig 2010, Cohen 2012, Cohen and McCarthy 2014, Hüesker and Moss 2015. An environmental problem is framed as having a particular spatial and temporal scale also as a result of resources available (data, information and knowledge made available through adequate human and financial resources), the features of the decision processes in place and how inclusive these decision-making processes are.…”

Spatial and temporal scale framing of a decision on the future of the Mactaquac Dam in New Brunswick, Canada

“…We coded the transcribed interviews and documents in RQDA, a qualitative data analysis package in R (Huang 2014). In a combined deductive-inductive approach, we used the conceptual framework to develop a codebook of problem and solution frames, and hydrological, administrative, spatial, and temporal scales.…”

“…Although the city's boundaries were ultimately adopted, it was only after a lengthy conflict. This strategic reconfiguration of scales to meet particular ends, whether done intentionally or unintentionally, is called the politics of scale (Leitner et al 2008, Hüesker andMoss 2015).…”

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