Water Management Across Borders, Scales and Sectors: Recent developments and future challenges in water policy analysis

Abstract

Integrated water resource management (IWRM) is widely accepted and has been implemented though international, national and regional water management guidelines. Nonetheless, concrete implementation of IWRM gives rise to new questions for policy analysis. Scholars interested in water regulation, the design of effective and efficient policy instruments, and structures of participative and multi‐level policy processes face challenges regarding research design, concepts and empirical approaches. This special issue integrates research about regional, national and transboundary policy perspectives on water management in seven countries, four continents and two transnational water bodies. From the six articles presented in this special issue, we learn more about how to define integration, to think about borders and scales and to theoretically and empirically study collaborative management in water policy analysis. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Politics of flood risk management in Switzerland: Political feasibility of instrument mixes

“…However, the effects of actors' process inclusion are discussed controversially in the literature, resulting in rival hypotheses. This study focuses on the hypothesis that diverse instrument types help policy makers to increase multiple actors' acceptance of a proposed policy solution, stimulate consensus in policy discussions and foster problem-solving capacities (Ingold, Fischer, Boer, & Mollinga, 2016). Consequently, and according to these basic effects of number, coerciveness and balance of instruments in a mix, actors who lead a policy design process (i.e., policy principals) tend to prefer a balanced instrument mix consisting of multiple, coercive and balanced instruments that target a problem successfully.…”

Water Governance and Social Learning: Approaches, Tools, and Challenges

“…During the twentieth century, the "hydraulic paradigm" justified state intervention in freshwater management, with national and regional governments damming and diverting water bodies "in the national interest" (Ingold et al 2016). The ecological crises precipitated by this paradigm, as well as its tendency to exacerbate regional and local conflicts, have resulted in a vacuum in freshwater policy in the twenty-first century which is being filled by a variety of different water management techniques and approaches (Smidt et al 2016).…”

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

“…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].…”

“…Integrated water resource management picks up these challenges with the aim to promote sustainable management across sectors. Scholars of public policy are engaging in the design of new policy instruments that encourage collaboration not only across sectors but as well across countries and across scales [11]. On the other hand, the social-ecological systems framework (SES) assumes that different ecological systems require specific governance arrangements, which are customized according to the ecological as well as the social dynamics of the system and that are sufficiently flexible in adapting to system changes.…”