Does River Basin Management Planning Under the Water Framework Directive Fulfil its Purposes? Findings From an Assessment of River Basin Management Plans in Germany, Spain and the UK

With the Water Framework Directive (WFD), 2000, the EU introduced a new mode of public policy implementation, namely mandated participatory planning. The Directive’s overarching goal of ‘good water status’ should be achieved through cyclical planning involving public participation. River Basin Management Plans (RBMPs) and Programmes of Measures (PoMs), which had to be drafted by 2009 by local authorities, are meant to serve as the central vehicles of implementation. But do these plans actually fulfil their purposes? We assess RBMPs and PoMs from Germany, Spain and the UK. Our findings suggest that these plans only partly perform their purported functions, because (1) collaboration in river-basin districts across jurisdictions remains limited, (2) public input remains limited, and (3) many of the plans end up as symbolic reporting exercises with actual water management bypassing official planning. We close by discussing the implications of such ‘hollow’ plans for future modes of EU environmental policy.