Integrated Water Resources Management and Policy Integration: Lessons from 169 Years of Flood Policies in Switzerland

Abstract

In times of increasing pressures on water resources, the integrated management of the resource is a central policy objective. While there exists encompassing research about the concept of integrated water resources management (IWRM), much remains to be studied regarding the integration of water-related policies. Water resources management profits when policy actors coordinate their demands and actions across policy sectors, territorial entities, and decision-making levels within a water basin. However, actors are bound by the policy framework, which organizes water resources management in defined sectors and, over time, develop into independent and specialized policy pillars. A growing number of policies increases the need to integrate those policies over time following the institutional resources regime (IRR) framework. However, an increasing number of policies also proves challenging in establishing an integrated, coherent regime compliant with IWRM. In this study, we analyze flood risk management policies and find an almost exponential increase in policies over time, while flood risks and damage have not decreased in parallel. We address this empirical puzzle with an in-depth analysis of the design of Swiss flood risk management policies over time. To this end, we survey the opinion of 146 flood experts on the importance of ten policy design indicators in three flood-prone regions in Switzerland. Flood risk management experts attribute particular importance to policy designs characterized by integration, a sufficient budget for policy implementation, and coercive instruments and sanctions. We then compare survey results to the ways in which Swiss policies have been designed in legislation across policy sectors related to flood risk management over the last 169 years. We find that policy designs follow a national policy style. Placing these results in local contexts, we explain why the design of policies represents both a challenge and opportunity for policy-makers involved in flood risk management.

Salient to Whom? The Positioning of German Political Parties on Agricultural Pollutants in Water Bodies

“…The literature has increasingly argued for an integration of policies when dealing with environmental protection issues [53][54][55][56][57]. With regard to water quality protection, the integrated water resource management principle has become one of the guiding principles of water management.…”

“…Water issues typically stem from activities exogenous to the water sector, necessitating an integration between water protection and other policy fields. This tends to be termed 'horizontal integration' [54][55][56][57][59][60][61].…”

Livestock Farming at the Expense of Water Resources? The Water–Energy–Food Nexus in Regions with Intensive Livestock Farming

“…The second resource is water in the form of groundwater and surface water, which is a common-pool resource and influenced by the food system in manifold ways [16]. The integration of water-related policies in other policy fields remains a challenge and in many cases results in the pollution or overharvesting of water resources [19,31,32]. Though integrated water resource management is gaining scholarly and political relevance, there are still important deficiencies when it comes to the concrete implementation [11].…”

“…Taking up hypotheses from nexus research we show that policymaking is still relatively unconnected between food, water and energy policy [15][16][17]. Each of these policy fields has different goals and priorities, which do not sufficiently consider the influences on the respective other subsystems [18,19]. This leads to adverse outcomes and prevents a sustainable management of resources.…”

Special Issue “Public Policy Analysis of Integrated Water Resource Management”

“…However, as the contributions of this Special Issue show, we consider it an added value when researchers are clear about what policy dimension (substantive, procedural, or institutional) is most relevant for the case under study (see [27]). Some authors present their water-related challenges and try to explain one dimension (typically policy outputs) through specificities of the other two dimensions: the process (politics) or the institutional setting (polity) that lead to this output (see [28][29][30][31]). Others try to understand the whole IWRM design or implementation process, being interested in IWRM outcomes such as irrigation efficiency or water quality [29,30].…”