The water framework directive, paradigm shift or unrealized promises?A critical evaluation of its implementation from a boundary, economic and socio-political perspective

  1. Hernández-Mora Zapata, Nuria
Supervised by:
  1. Leandro del Moral Ituarte Director

Defence university: Universidad de Sevilla

Fecha de defensa: 03 October 2016

Committee:
  1. Antonio Embid Irujo Chair
  2. Pilar Paneque Salgado Secretary
  3. Anna Ribas Palom Committee member
  4. Joan Subirats Humet Committee member
  5. Alberto Garrido Colmenero Committee member

Type: Thesis

Teseo: 430993 DIALNET lock_openIdus editor

Abstract

The approval of Directive 2000/60/EC, better known as the Water Framework Directive (WFD), resulted from efforts to create a coherent approach to water policy at the European scale. It requires surface waters (rivers, lakes, wetlands and transitional and coastal waters) to attain good ecological and chemical status and establishes quantitative and chemical standards for groundwater. The WFD required a significant shift in priorities, goals and operational procedures by placing the emphasis on ecosystem protection and ecological health as a means to guarantee the availability of sufficient good quality water to meet sustainable needs. By establishing the river basin as the pre-eminent geographical scale for water management, it also explicitly recognized that any policy aiming at protecting European waters necessarily had to deal with the policies that guided activities in the surrounding watershed. The discussion and approval of the WFD coincided with a growing debate about, and advocacy for, a paradigm shift in water management. The shift was the expression, in the field of water resources management, of a transformation in the way we understand the relationship between society and nature, reflecting changes in other realms of our socioeconomic environment. The new approach results from the need to acknowledge the hybrid nature of water, emphasizing the complexity of the ecological, socioeconomic, technological, cultural and institutional processes that are intertwined in discourses and understandings of water. Claims about the legitimacy of intervention no longer reside exclusively in the realms of authority and privileged knowledge. Rather, legitimacy now depends on shared definitions of both problem and potential solutions. The evolving water management paradigm thus results from the fact that we are dealing with complex and reflexive socioecological systems and there are diverse incommensurable and equally valid interpretations of our physical environments. In the context of uncertainty, complexity, differing world views and high stakes that characterize water management challenges, new governance approaches have been offered as panaceas to effectively handle them. Most significant among them is the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), which promotes the principles of integration, participatory management approaches, and the use of economic instruments to achieve water policy goals. The WFD is perhaps the most comprehensive and far reaching attempt to align water management policy and practice along these principles. An evaluation of its implementation can therefore throw some light on the potential for these management prescriptions to successfully deal with the challenges that are inherent to problems of complex socio-ecological systems This dissertation contributes to a significant body of scholarly work that has studied the European experience with the WFD by critically analyzing the experience of its implementation from three complementary theoretical perspectives that refer three of the four pillars of the WFD: the scalar choices that derive from the application of the IWRM approach to water resources management that the WFD embodies; the use of economic instruments to achieve water policy goals; and the emphasis on public information, consultation and participation to legitimize water planning and management decisions and improve the effectiveness of the Directive. Through the analysis of the geographically specific case of Spain, it questions the underlying assumptions that justify this approach to European water governance and tries to discern whether the policy goals have been met. The analysis is presented through three articles that have been published in peer reviewed academic journals and a fourth publication, of a more normative nature, that reviews the evolution of water policy in Spain with a particular focus on the post-WFD implementation period. The first article (Chapter 4) summarizes the state of the art of the current debate on scalar politics and water governance. In this context, the paper reviews the territorial and organizational evolution of river basin authorities in Spain, since their origins in 1926 as Confederaciones Sindicales Hidrográficas, to their situation in 2015, in light of the current critical approach to the river basin as the unquestionable scale for water governance. It analyzes the complex process of adjustment of the river basin management approach to the politicaladministrative division of the state into increasingly powerful Autonomous regions that emerged with the advent of democracy in the 1970s, and the ensuing reconfiguration of areas of influence, division of authority, and emergence of power conflicts that are still unresolved. The paper argues that when discussing 'spatial fit' issues dealing with natural resources management, special attention should be given to ensuing changes in social relationships and power structures that each option entails, within their specific historical and geographical context. The second article (Chapter 5) discusses the way economic instruments are being promoted as a desirable alternative to public sector action in the allocation and management of natural resources. The case of water is at the vanguard of these processes and is proving to be particularly contentious. In the European Union water policies are increasingly emphasizing the application of economic instruments to improve the allocative equity and economic efficiency in the use of scarce resources. However, there are few analyses of how these instruments are really working on the ground and whether they are meeting their objectives. The paper aims to contribute to this debate by critically analyzing the experience with water markets in Spain, the only country in the European Union where they are operative. It looks at water permit sales during the 2005-2008drought period using the Tajo-Segura transfer infrastructure. The paper describes how the institutional process of mercantilización of water works in practice in Spain. It shows that the use of markets requires an intense process of institutional development to facilitate and encourage their operation. Additionally it argues that these institutions tend to favor the interests of clearly identifiable elites, instead of the public interest they supposedly promote. The third article (Chapter 6) looks at the shift from hierarchical-administrative water management toward more transparent, multi-level and participated governance approaches that has brought about a shifting geography of players, scales of action, and means of influencing decisions and outcomes. In Spain, where the hydraulic paradigm has dominated since the early 1920s, participation in decisions over water was traditionally limited to a closed water policy community, made up of economic water users, primarily irrigator associations and hydropower generators, civil engineering corps and large public works companies. The river basin planning process under the WFD presented a promise of transformation, giving access to non-economic water users, environmental concerns and the wider public to water-related information on planning and decision-making. This process coincided with the consolidation of the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by the water administration, with the associated potential for information and data generation and dissemination. ICTs are also increasingly used by citizen groups and other interested parties as a way to communicate, network and challenge existing paradigms and official discourses over water, in the broader context of the emergence of 'technopolitics'. The paper investigates if and in what way ICTs may be providing new avenues for participated water resources management and contributing to alter the dominating power balance. We critically analyze several examples where networking possibilities provided by ICTs have enabled the articulation of interest groups and social agents (what we call citizen water networks - CWN) that have, with different degrees of success, questioned the existing hegemonic view over water. The critical review of these cases sheds light on the opportunities and limitations of ICTs, and their relation with traditional modes of social mobilization in creating new means of societal involvement in water governance. It also shows that the low democratic profile of current water management institutions in Spain clearly hinders ICTs' potential to democratize decision-making processes. Without a real willingness to open up true spaces of deliberation where all actors can participate in conditions of equality, the role of ICTs will remain one of strengthening CWNs' organizational capabilities and ability to obtain and generate information, but will not alter the basic framework for water policy-making. The final article (Chapter 7) complements the more theoretical focus of the previous chapters and from a normative perspective analyzes the evolution of Spanish water policy since the approval of the 1985 Water act. It focuses on the post-WFD implementation period (from 2003 onwards) and on the role economic water users, environmental interests and engaged citizens have played in the achievement of some key WFD-related water policy goals: environmental objectives; public and user participation in water planning and management; and use of economic instruments to achieve water policy goals. Relying on a review of different examples and experiences, the paper concludes that the necessary transformation in water policy goals, operations and procedures required by the implementation of the WFD has not taken place. The traditional water policy community has resisted this transformation and largely continues to dominate water policy decision-making. At the same time, in the context of the WFD a variety of citizen water networks that defend the patrimonial values of water have develop