Suchergebnisse

Water is an essential natural resource, yet we are experiencing a global water crisis. This crisis is first and foremost a crisis of governance rather than of actual physical resources. Capacities of single, unitary states are severely challenged by the complex, multi-scalar, and dynamic structure of contemporary problems in water resource management. New modes of governance stress the potential of public participation and scalar restructuring for effective and legitimate environmental decision-making. However, a lack evidence on the actual implementation and instrumental value of novel governance modes stands in stark contrast to the strong beliefs and assumptions that often see these being propagated as ´panaceas´ or ´universal remedies´. With this doctoral dissertation I aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of the implementation and performance of public participation and scalar restructuring in environmental governance, and particularly to engage in systematic research into the contextual factors that shape the performance of such governance innovations. Based on the conceptual approaches of participatory, multi-level governance and scale, I advance a conceptual framework specifying mechanisms and important contextual factors describing the potential of participation and rescaling to impact on the efficacy of environmental decision-making. Applying this framework, I employ a mixed-methods approach combining qualitative, quantitative, set-theoretic, and review methods, with the aim of maximising the validity of results. Drawing on the institutional frame of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD), I first assess the extent and conditions under which participation and rescaling are actually implemented in the European water resource management regime. Subsequent analyses examine whether these governance shifts, where implemented, actually lead to environmentally effective and legitimate political decisions, and foster social outcomes. Results indicate that actual changes in governance structures remain modest, whereas previous institutional structures and experiences prove rather durable. Hence, despite recent shifts distributing authority towards alternative actors and scales, the state has persisted in its role as central authority in the European water resource management regime. To the extent that they were implemented, public participation and rescaling were generally positively related with the environmental effectiveness and legitimacy of political outcomes. The analysis provides a context-sensitive understanding, by unravelling the supposedly linear relationship between governance inputs and outputs to develop a more nuanced picture of the governance process rather as a composition of multiple, interdependent causal mechanisms that, depending on their actual configuration, lead to various outcomes. In this way, particularly the tension between legitimacy and effectiveness of political outcomes is disentangled, with both being seen as the result of distinct but interrelated properties of the governance system and its contextual circumstances. The thesis furthermore provides insights of practical and policy relevance, highlighting the need and potential to take a context-sensitive perspective in policy design and decision-making. The framework paper and the Ph.D. thesis thus together enhance academic understanding of environmental governance and its potential contributions to sustainability transitions. ; Trotz der essentiellen Bedeutung der Ressource Wasser erleben wir derzeit eine Krise von globalem Ausmaß. Diese Krise ist jedoch zuvorderst eine politische Krise und weniger eine der physischen Ressource selbst. Die Kapazitäten und Möglichkeiten etablierter einzelstaatlicher Strukturen werden durch die komplexe, multi-skalare und dynamische Struktur der Probleme im Wasserressourcenmanagement stark in Frage gestellt. Demgegenüber betonen alternative Modi der politischen Steuerung die Potenziale von Öffentlichkeitsbeteiligung und skalarer Umstrukturierung als Mittel zu einer effektiveren und legitimeren Umweltpolitik. Jedoch steht den starken Hoffnungen und Überzeugungen in den instrumentellen Wert dieser neuen Steuerungsmodi ein Mangel an empirischer Evidenz entgegen. Es ist daher das Ziel dieser Dissertation zu einem vertieften Verständnis der Umsetzung und Leistungsfähigkeit von partizipativer und skalar umstrukturierter Governance beizutragen. Besonderes Augenmerk gilt der systematischen Analyse von Kontextfaktoren und Bedingungen und deren Einfluss auf die Wirksamkeit von alternativen Modi politischer Steuerung. Die theoretische Grundlage dieser Arbeit bildet ein konzeptionelles Rahmenwerk, erstellt auf der Grundlage theoretisch-konzeptioneller Ansätze aus den Bereichen der Partizipationsforschung, Multi-Level Governance, und der Skalenliteratur. Dieses Rahmenwerk expliziert die Mechanismen, durch die partizipative und re-skalierte Formen von Governance potenziell zu einer effektiveren und legitimeren Umweltgovernance beitragen, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung relevanter Kontextbedingungen. Die empirische Anwendung dieses Rahmenwerks folgt einem Mixed-Methods Design, das qualitative, quantitative, mengentheoretische und Review-Methoden miteinander kombiniert mit dem Ziel zu möglichst validen Erkenntnissen zu gelangen. In einem ersten Schritt und mit Fokus auf die EU Wasserrahmenrichtlinie (WRRL) untersucht diese Arbeit dabei, ob und unter welchen Bedingungen Partizipation und skalare Umstrukturierung im europäischen Wasserregime tatsächlich stattfinden, um dann, in einem zweiten Schritt, zu untersuchen ob ein solcher Wandel von Governance auch zu umweltgerechten und legitimen politischen Entscheidungen und dem Aufbau sozialen Kapitals beiträgt. Die Forschungsergebnisse zeigen, dass Governancestrukturen sich bislang moderat veränderten, wobei sich bestehende institutionelle Strukturen und Erfahrungen als beständig erweisen. Dementsprechend und trotz neuerlicher Verschiebungen von Autorität auf alternative Akteure und Skalen, erfüllt der Staat weiterhin die Rolle der zentralen Autorität im europäischen Wasserregime. Dort, wo Partizipation und re-skalierte Governancestrukturen implementiert wurden, lässt sich ein positiver Zusammenhang mit der Effektivität und Legitimität umweltpolitischer Entscheidungen feststellen. Die Analyse stellt dabei das lineare Verhältnis zwischen politischen Inputs und Outputs in Frage und entwickelt stattdessen ein nuancierteres Bild, das Governanceprozesse als eine Komposition mehrerer, interdependenter Wirkungsmechanismen begreift, die, je nach spezifischer Ausprägung, zu verschiedenen Outcomes führen. Auf Basis eines derartigen, kontextspezifischen Verständnisses wird insbesondere das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Legitimität und der Problemlösungskapazität politischer Outcomes entflochten, als beide als Resultat bestimmter, zusammenhängender Eigenschaften des Governancesystems und dessen Kontextbedingungen verstanden werden können.

AbstractHorizontal cooperation among political systems is crucial for addressing large-scale and boundary-crossing policy problems. This article introduces and analyzes policy-specific factors that help to explain horizontal cooperation among subnational-governments. It thereby builds on but specifies arguments from the literature on horizontal federalism that has usually been focusing on general institutional and societal factors to explain cooperation. These factors capture how a given policy problem unfolds (problem pressure), the ways in which subnational governments are exposed to and experience its consequences in similar or unequal ways (functional interdependencies and their symmetry), and how the issues are treated domestically (problem awareness). We illustrate the potential importance of these factors by analyzing treaties among Swiss substates in the water domain and relying on network analytic methods. We find that problem awareness and functional interdependencies and their (a)symmetries are important, whereas problem pressure has a mixed influence, depending on the issue area.

Impacts of climate change, such as sea-level rise and changes in annual precipitation, are becoming increasingly visible around the world and within Germany, thus increasing pressures to adapt. Forces of stability and change within established policy fields greatly determine the extent to which governance systems can adapt to worsening existing risks and new challenges. Employing a lock-in perspective and a comparative analysis of the governance of coastal risks in Schleswig-Holstein and water scarcity in Thuringia, we show how infrastructures, institutions, actors, and cognitive framing shape policy landscapes and together constitute dynamics of policy stability and change in the face of long-term climate impacts. This paper offers a comprehensive, systemic perspective of how adaptation challenges fit into established policy paradigms and programs as it highlights how non-material and material components are intertwined and can act as constraints to policy-making.

This article attempts to shed new light on prevailing puzzles of spatial scales in multi-level, participatory governance as regards the democratic legitimacy and environmental effectiveness of governance systems. We focus on the governance re-scaling by the European Water Framework Directive, which introduced new governance scales (mandated river basin management) and demands consultation of citizens and encourages 'active involvement' of stakeholders. This allows to examine whether and how re-scaling through deliberate governance interventions impacts on democratic legitimacy and effective environmental policy delivery. To guide the enquiry, this article organizes existing—partly contradictory—claims on the relation of scale, democratic legitimacy, and environmental effectiveness into three clusters of mechanisms, integrating insights from multi-level governance, social-ecological systems, and public participation. We empirically examine Water Framework Directive implementation in a comparative case study of multi-level systems in the light of the suggested mechanisms. We compare two planning areas in Germany: North Rhine Westphalia and Lower Saxony. Findings suggest that the Water Framework Directive did have some impact on institutionalizing hydrological scales and participation. Local participation appears generally both more effective and legitimate than on higher levels, pointing to the need for yet more tailored multi-level governance approaches, depending on whether environmental knowledge or advocacy is sought. We find mixed results regarding the potential of participation to bridge spatial 'misfits' between ecological and administrative scales of governance, depending on the historical institutionalization of governance on ecological scales. Polycentricity, finally, appeared somewhat favorable in effectiveness terms with some distinct differences regarding polycentricity in planning vs. polycentricity in implementation.

AbstractActors rarely approach institutional design choices with a blank slate but are influenced by design choices made at earlier stages. How does institutional design evolve over time and are there specific paths to deepening cooperation? We investigate the institutional design paths of subnational cooperation that are chosen to address increasingly complex and interconnected policy problems. We theorize that besides the substantive problem, earlier choices matter to explain what institutional design mechanism is chosen; that is, the design of existing institutions between two subnational governance units, called substates, influences the design of subsequent institutions. Using a semi‐parametric Cox proportional hazards model, we show that the design paths of subnational cooperation in the Swiss water governance sector correlate with earlier design choices. Our results indicate that not all cooperation is self‐reinforcing and path‐dependent, but they show which specific design choices are more likely to follow each other in repeated formal federal intergovernmental cooperation.

AbstractThere is much enthusiasm among scholars and public administrators for participatory and collaborative modes of governance as a means to tackle contemporary environmental problems. Participatory and collaborative approaches are expected to both enhance the environmental standard of the outputs of decision-making processes and improve the implementation of these outputs. In this article, we draw on a database of 305 coded published cases of public environmental decision-making to identify key pathways via which participation fosters effective environmental governance. We develop a conceptual model of the hypothesized relationship between participation, environmental outputs, and implementation, mediated by intermediate (social) outcomes such as social learning or trust building. Testing these assumptions through structural equation modeling and exploratory factor analysis, we find a generally positive effect of participation on the environmental standard of governance outputs, in particular where communication intensity is high and where participants are delegated decision-making power. Moreover, we identify two latent variables—convergence of stakeholder perspectives and stakeholder capacity building—to mediate this relationship. Our findings point to a need for treating complex and multifaceted phenomena such as participation in a nuanced manner, and to pay attention to how particular mechanisms work to foster a range of social outcomes and to secure more environmentally effective outputs and their implementation.

AbstractCurrent European Union (EU) policies require policy-makers on different levels of government to engage with new forms of governance such as participatory planning, aiming to improve environmental policy delivery. We address the central issue of how policy-makers learn about the appropriateness of different modes of governance. By way of example, we examine recent innovations in EU water governance – primarily through the enactment of the Water Framework Directive (2000) and the Floods Directive (2007), and their requirements for stakeholder participation in the planning process. We discuss scope for policy-induced 'governance learning', wherein policy-makers draw on evidence and experience to learn about how to design and execute effective participatory planning and decision-making. In doing so, we aim to extend work on policy learning by focusing on the procedural dimensions of governance, and make a case for more coordinated and systematic approaches to gathering evidence and learning from ongoing EU environmental policy implementation.