Disproportionate costs in the EU Water Framework Directive—How to justify less stringent environmental objectives

Klauer, Bernd; Sigel, Katja; Schiller, Johannes

doi:10.1016/j.envsci.2016.01.017

Cited by 16 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Also, if academics sought to further develop methodologies to justify disproportionate costs in member states, they should do so in a rigorous but pragmatic way which would be as little time and resource consuming as possible (but see [27]). …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Undermining European Environmental Policy Goals? The EU Water Framework Directive and the Politics of Exemptions

Boeuf

Fritsch

Martín-Ortega

2016

Water

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Abstract:The Water Framework Directive (WFD) is the core legislative instrument in the European Union for the protection of water resources. Adopted in 2000, its objectives were to achieve "good status" for water bodies by 2015 and prevent any further deterioration. However, the European Commission and some stakeholders are rather dissatisfied with the implementation of the Directive so far, in particular with the use of exemptions to the environmental objectives. Exemptions are of paramount importance: they may constitute a significant obstacle to the achievement of the WFD's objectives as they enable member states to lower the ambition of the Directive and to delay the achievement of good status, thereby undermining the environmental goal of the WFD. Critical voices observe an excessive reliance on exemptions, poor justifications, and great variations in their use. Based on an analysis of 120 policy documents and 15 semi-structured interviews, this article provides explanations for the politics of exemptions in EU water management. It shows that different viewpoints and interpretations on the WFD's objectives and exemptions were already present in the negotiation phase of the Directive, but remained undefined on purpose. Moreover, dysfunctional decision-making procedures in the Common Implementation Strategy and the lack of political support in WFD implementation were significant obstacles to an agreement on this important issue. Finally, decisions on WFD implementation in member states were often driven by pragmatism. The article explains how the negotiations of the WFD and the EU-level discussion on the implementation of the Directive undermined environmental goals in EU governance; its findings are also relevant for policy fields other than water.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Undermining European Environmental Policy Goals? The EU Water Framework Directive and the Politics of Exemptions

Boeuf

Fritsch

Martín-Ortega

2016

Water

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“…There is a rich academic literature making recommendations on how to undertake disproportionality analyses (Brouwer, 2008;Del Saz-Salazar et al, 2009;Martin-Ortega, 2012;Galioto et al, 2013;Gómez-Limón & Martin-Ortega, 2013;Martin-Ortega et al, 2014;Feuillette et al, 2016;Klauer et al, 2016;Klauer et al, 2017). While these studies differ in important ways, they have one thing in common: they acknowledge that CBA and affordability tests are multi-dimensional.…”

Section: Analytical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Benefit transfers apply benefit values estimated from a particular location to another location with similar characteristics. This method is often used when local data are unavailable, but it comes with obvious methodological weaknesses (Klauer et al, 2016).…”

Section: Costs and Benefits Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other works offer recommendations based on academic experiments (e.g. Del Saz-Salazar et al, 2009;Vinten et al, 2012;Galioto et al, 2013;Perni & Martínez-Paz, 2013;Martin-Ortega et al, 2015;Klauer et al, 2016;Machac & Slavikova, 2016;Klauer et al, 2017). Obviously, these works may provide great benefits to practitioners and researchers, but they say little about what is happening on the ground.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Justifying exemptions through policy appraisal: ecological ambitions and water policy in France and the United Kingdom

2018

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Justifying exemptions through policy appraisal: ecological ambitions and water policy in France and the United Kingdom For Water Policy AbstractThe Water Framework Directive aims to achieve good status for all water bodies in the European Union. However, exemption clauses enable member states to delay protective measures and to lower water quality objectives. The ambiguity of exemption clauses has lead to a plurality of approaches across the continent. They differ as to their political objectives, i.e. the overall ambition displayed in implementing the Directive, and to their methodological choices, i.e. the analytical tools used to justify exemptions. This article argues that those political and methodological dimensions influence each other. Relying on a framework of analysis that integrates key recommendations from the literature, we explore the usage and justification of exemptions in two countries, the United Kingdom and France. Our analysis suggests that analytical methods were often decided so as to reflect the ecological ambitions of a country, and some methodological choices seem to have had unintended consequences for water quality objectives. We conclude that economic methods should be adapted so that they take into account, rather than ignore, the political ambitions of a country in the field of water.

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“…Throughout Europe, there is as yet no unified and only a few well-established, applicable methodologies for routinely assessing disproportionality (for an overview see [4]). However, the attempts made by the European member states have rarely been published and/or reflected in the scientific literature.…”

Section: Interpretation Of Disproportionalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Is the Achievement of “Good Status” for German Surface Waters Disproportionately Expensive?—Comparing Two Approaches to Assess Disproportionately High Costs in the Context of the European Water Framework Directive

Klauer

Schiller

Sigel

2017

Water

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Currently only 8.2% of German surface water bodies have reached the goal of the European Water Framework Directive to bring all water into a "good status". For all water bodies that presumably will not achieve the objective by 2027, the member states have to justify an exemption by 2021, for example, by arguing that the costs of achieving "good status" would be "disproportionately high". In this paper, two approaches for assessing cost-disproportionality of surface water bodies are empirically tested and compared on a set of real-world data from a German federal state. In the first approach, called average cost approach, costs are considered as being disproportionately high if they are significantly higher than what would be a "relatively normal effort". The core idea of the second, the benchmark approach, is to take the past public expenditures on water management as a basis for comparison. Both approaches include generated utility for determination of a water-body-specific disproportionality threshold. While the benchmarking approach needs less data, the empirical tests indicate that both approaches yield comparable results and are suitable to support authorities in the decision as to which water bodies are to be considered disproportionately expensive such that exemptions are justified.

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Disproportionate costs in the EU Water Framework Directive—How to justify less stringent environmental objectives

Cited by 16 publications

References 12 publications

Undermining European Environmental Policy Goals? The EU Water Framework Directive and the Politics of Exemptions

Undermining European Environmental Policy Goals? The EU Water Framework Directive and the Politics of Exemptions

Justifying exemptions through policy appraisal: ecological ambitions and water policy in France and the United Kingdom

Is the Achievement of “Good Status” for German Surface Waters Disproportionately Expensive?—Comparing Two Approaches to Assess Disproportionately High Costs in the Context of the European Water Framework Directive

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