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Can River Basin Organisations (RBOs) actually improve water governance? RBOs are frequently layered on top of existing governmental organisations, which are often reluctant to share their power. This, in turn, can affect their performance. The Politics of River Basin Organisations addresses this issue by exploring the subject on a global level. -- 'A long overdue volume which comes to grips with the diversity of physical, political and administrative realities behind the seemingly uniform and appealing institution of the River Basin Organization. This book squarely engages with the politics of RBO formation and will provide clues and inspiration to those interested in further exploring the complexities of human institutions in their attempt to manage water resources for the greater good.' (François Molle, IRD and International Water Management Institute (IWMI), France). -- 'A critical challenge for humanity is to design institutions for stewardship of water and ecosystem services in a globalized world faced with climate change. Dave Huitema and Sander Meijerink take on this challenge in this impressive volume. Through case studies from a diverse set of countries, all using a joint typology as a framework for the analyses, a deeper understanding of the political dimension of river basin stewardship is provided--exciting. Enjoy!' (Carl Folke, Beijer Institute, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden). -- 'There is no better book on river basin organisations for practitioners and researchers. It imposes tough criteria to evaluate the performance of eleven such hydrologic based governance forms. Findings are surprising and cautionary for water resources reformers. The authors suggest that the demands of complex interaction and interplay in layered organisational environments, the power of inertia to thwart change, and inability to command resources can overwhelm the aspirations of river basin organisations for coordination, accountability, legitimacy and environmental effectiveness. This book belongs in the library of everyone seriously interested in water management.' (Helen Ingram, University of California at Irvine and University of Arizona, US).

For decades now, scholars have grappled with questions about how knowledge producers can enhance the influence of their knowledge on users and improve policy making. However, little attention has been paid to how policy experiments, a flexible and ex ante method of policy appraisal, obtain influence over political decision-making. To address this gap, an exploratory framework has been developed that facilitates systematic analysis of multiple experiments, allowing hypotheses to be tested regarding how an experiment's institutional design can influence the views of political decision-makers. Cash's categories of effectiveness are used to describe an experiment's conceptual influence; being how credible, salient, and legitimate decision-makers perceive an experiment to be. The hypotheses are tested using 14 experiment cases found relevant to climate adaptation in the Netherlands, with complete survey responses from over 70 respondents. The results show that although, in general, the experiments had medium to high influence on decision-makers, institutional design does have a noticeable impact. Organisers should make choices carefully when designing an experiment, particularly in order to maintain relevance during an experiment's implementation and to build community acceptance. Suggestions for future research include a comparison of experiment effects with the effects of non-experimental forms of appraisal, such as piloting or ex ante impact assessment.

The idea that ecosystem management should be approached at the bioregional scale is central to the thinking on adaptive governance. Taken to the domain of water management, a bioregional approach implies the foundation of river basin organizations (RBOs), a notion that has been warmly welcomed by scholars and practitioners alike. However, it appears that river basin organizations come in various shapes and sizes, their intended foundation often leads to resistance, and their actual performance is understudied. Through this special feature we seek to advance the state of our knowledge in this respect. Through this introduction we lay the foundation for the case studies that follow in the special feature and for the conclusions. We do so by presenting a worked typology of river basin organizations. This typology helps us differentiate between various kinds of proposals that are all referred to as river basin organizations, but that are actually quite different in nature. In addition, in this introduction we present an approach to dissecting the inevitable political debates that ensue once a proposal to found a river basin organization is made, something that is often ill understood by the proponents of river basin organizations. After this, we explain the criteria that one could use to assess the performance of river basin organizations that actually come into being. Although the thinking in adaptive governance is strongly concerned with ecological effectiveness, we do show that other criteria can be applied too. Finally, we briefly introduce the various contributions to the special feature.

One of the prescriptions for adaptive comanagement of social-ecological systems is to follow a bioregional approach. In water resources management, experience has been gained with a bioregional approach by the foundation of river basin organizations (RBOs). Here, we summarize the results of a research project involving 27 colleagues who have undertaken an analysis of the global discussion on RBOs and the foundation of RBOs in Canada, USA, Great Britain, Germany, Portugal, South Africa, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Thailand, and Australia. Drawing on Ostrom's institutional analysis and development framework, we first present a fine-grained analysis of the institutional architecture of these RBOs, which enables us to distinguish between autonomous, coordinating, partnership, and agency type RBOs. Second, we unravel the main controversies over this architecture by focusing on the key actors involved in either promoting or hindering RBO formation, globally and at the national level. Third, we summarize how the performance of RBOs can be evaluated in terms of coordination, accountability, legitimacy, and environmental effectiveness. Finally, we discuss the relationship between institutional design and performance. The main findings are: (1) the foundation of RBOs is not a neutral process but rather a highly political one, (2) the foundation of RBOs creates complex accountability relationships, and (3) institutional interplay, the capacity to generate financial resources, and a minimum degree of institutional stability are crucial to the successes of RBOs in realizing coordination and environmental effectiveness.

This paper focuses on the role of policy entrepreneurs in realizing water policy transitions. The central questions are to what extent have policy entrepreneurs played a role in realizing major change in water policies, who are these policy entrepreneurs, and what strategies have they used to bring about change? The policy science literature suggests that policy entrepreneurs have an arsenal of possible strategies for achieving change. Based on a comparative analysis of water policy changes in 15 countries around the globe and the European Union, we investigate which strategies have in practice been used by policy entrepreneurs, to what effect, and which lessons for managing water transitions we can draw from this. The comparative case analysis shows that individuals play complementary roles; hence, entrepreneurship in water management is often collective entrepreneurship. Strategies of coalition building, the manipulation of decision making forums, and the strategic framing of issues and windows are crucial to understanding water policy change, which suggests that the management of water policy transitions is a highly political game. We conclude by listing recommendations for those who would like to direct water policy change.