https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4349-4162
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ABSTRACT
Water governance is central to the crisis of the Anthropocene as climate change, population growth and changing demands for water are predicted to exacerbate threats to food, water and energy security and river functioning. Since 2000 the major policy setting in Europe for the governance of water has been the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). Empirically grounded post-positivist water governance research strongly anchored in interpretivist and constructivist systems’ traditions akin to deliberative policy analysis (DPA) is reported. The case is made, based on the UK (England), that an opportunity to transform water governance has been lost because WFD implementation has been prescriptive, top-down and fails to engage with dynamic complexity. Some changes have emerged from the adoption of a Catchment-Based Approach (CaBA), partly triggered by threat to government of a judicial review, but governance praxis and trajectory remain contested. The paper reports on new pathways and options for change emerging from a systemic co-inquiry, a deliberative instrument, which emphasises the importance of institutionalising community action at catchment scale and re-framing the enactment of the Directive as part of an iterative social learning system for water governance. In the light of our findings, implications for future DPA scholarship are explored.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Natalie Foster BSc, PhD is Visiting Research Fellow at the Open University. Her research focuses on the interactions between people and the environment. She is a skilled presenter and facilitator and has considerable experience of using systems tools and techniques to enable learning in a range of multi-stakeholder situations. She has worked on international and national research projects, including Climate Adaptation and Water Governance, Community Action Platform for Energy and Natural Course.
Ray Ison BScAgr, PhD. is Professor of Systems, The Open University UK. From 2008 to 2015 he held a joint appointment as Professor, Systems for Sustainability at the Monash Sustainability Institute, Monash University Australia. At the OU is co-responsible for managing a post-graduate program in Systems Thinking in Practice (STiP). From 2000 to 2004 he successfully coordinated a major interdisciplinary 5th Framework programme (30 researchers, 6 countries) researching social learning for sustainable river catchment management as well as running an EPSRC-funded Systems Practice for Managing Complexity Network. He is the (co) author or (co) editor of 5 books, 40 book chapters, 120 refereed papers, 70+ other publications, 7 journal special editions and has been an invited Keynote speaker at many international and national conferences.
Chris Blackmore BSc, PGCE, PhD is Senior Lecturer in Environmental and Development Systems at the OpenUniversity. Blackmore’s main research area includes learning systems and communities of practice in contexts of environmental decision making and sustainable development. His key role is developing Masters’ level programmes in Environmental Decision Making and Systems Thinking in Practice, chairs a range of modules and writes open learning materials including for use in a virtual learning environment. Since early 2000s he has worked on a succession of EU-funded international research projects. Blackmore designs and runs courses/workshops with various UK and international academic and practitioner communities, mainly practice-based and action-research oriented.
Kevin Collins BSc, MPhil, PhD is Senior Lecturer in Systems and Environment at the Open University, UK. His research interests focus on combining systems’ concepts and practices and ideas of social learning to enable transformations in environmental managing, particularly water governance. He is an experienced designer and facilitator of systemic inquiries involving many different types of stakeholders in varied governance contexts and scales from catchments to national and international policy and practice. He also writes and chairs undergraduate and postgraduate modules on systems and the environment.
ORCID
Natalie Foster http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4349-4162
Ray Ison http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9191-119X
Chris Blackmore http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4365-8860
Kevin Collins http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5716-7536
Notes
1 Directive 2000/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2000 establishing a framework for Community action in the field of water policy (Official Journal L 327, 22/12/2000)
2 Case studies were conducted across Europe, including, among others, analysis of the early stages of WFD implementation in England, Wales and Scotland.
3 This question encompasses a preferred framing choice for rivers as coupled social and biophysical systems, mutually influencing over time i.e., part of a co-evolutionary, interdependent dynamic – see Ison (Citation2018).
4 All systems must be formulated by someone making boundary judgements. We use system-of-interest to avoid the ontological trap that arises from slippage, through every day, non-reflexive use of the concept “system”; systems-of-interest arise from situated practice, or praxis (theory-informed practical action) and are best considered as epistemological devices.
5 “A directive shall be binding, as to the result to be achieved, upon each Member State to which it is addressed, but shall leave to the national authorities the choice of form and methods” (Official Journal 2012/C 326/1 Article 288, pp.171-172).
6 One could also ask at what cost in terms of money spent as well as opportunity cost forgone.
7 Notes taken from London Start-Up Conference for the CaBA, 5th November 2013.
8 The Water Framework Directive (Standards and Classification) Directions (England and Wales) 2015, which revoked the 2009 and 2010 Directions with effect from 22 December 2015.
9 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, England’s largest environmental NGO.
10 For examples of praxis abuse/innovation see Collins and Ison’s (Citation2010) account of working with EA scientists to build a praxis for integrated catchment science.
11 Foster et al Citation2016 provide a full account of the design, methods, participants and evaluation of the activities described here; our purpose is not to describe our deliberative (or systemic) praxis but to situate what we have done in the unfolding exigencies of English water governance.
12 DPA can learn from the history of systems scholarship: early systems practitioners were called systems analysts, a term that conserved commitments to systems as ontologies rather than epistemologies.