Participation in River Basin Planning Under the Water Framework Directive – Has it Benefitted Good Water Status?

The participation of societal groups and the broader public has been a key feature in implementing the Water Framework Directive (WFD). Following a “mandated participatory planning approach” (Newig and Koontz 2014), non-state actor participation in the drafting of River Basin Management Plans was expected to help achieving the directive’s environmental goals. While participation has been implemented widely, the recent literature leaves us doubtful whether participation has really been delivering on its purposes (Domorenok, 2017; Voulvoulis et al., 2017). This study presents the results of a structured online survey among 118 public water managers, covering the six most populous EU member states, namely Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Poland. Results show that participatory WFD implementation included a wide range of non-state actor groups, but rarely citizens, and mostly followed little interactive communication modes. Broad public consultation, as well as citizen participation in active involvement processes, are given virtually no importance at all by the surveyed public officials. This stands in stark contrast to the expectations of the Commission that the role of citizens should be crucial for achieving the WFD’s objectives. In hindsight, the Commission’s aspirations that citizen participation benefits good water status appear overly naive – if not rather strategically motivated to compensate for Europe’s perceived remoteness from the citizens (Newig and Fritsch, 2009). Active involvement, on the other hand, warrants a more nuanced appreciation. While on average assessed of limited instrumentality, variation among and between countries is considerable. This suggests that particular localities and problem settings require context-adapted governance strategies, and the targeted involvement of organised non-state actor groups may or may not help. This resonates with earlier observations by Meadowcroft (2004) who assigns relatively more importance to the participation of organised stakeholder groups as compared to broad citizen participation in furthering sustainable development. The overall rather critical assessment of agriculture’s role (limited productive contributions to the planning process while overall having (too) strong an influence) combined with productive contributions of other actor groups (notably environmental groups) suggests that involving those groups who are among the most important polluters may be a good idea in theory, but in this case, little is gained for either planning or implementation. Rather, the clear identification of lacking financial resources as a main obstacle to WFD implementation may suggest that the reduction of polluting activities (and all other activities that negatively impact on the ecological status of water bodies) will require substantial financial compensation. Our study does not seal the end of participation in sustainable water governance. We need a clearer notion of which instruments work – and which do not. While our study centred on the independent variable – what did participation contribute to good water status? –, future research should more clearly target the dependent variable: What contributes to attaining good water status?