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Multiple actors across different institutional levels play a role in water governance. The coordination of these actors is important for effective water governance. However, the joining together of multiple actors can have several implications, such as a redistribution of power across actors, a change in democratic control and citizen influence as well as shifting accountability structures. These implications can involve different barriers and bridges that might impede or foster coordination. Through qualitative and quantitative methods, we assess the following barriers and bridges for coordination: (1) reputational power in terms of who is perceived as important for coordination in the water sector; (2) democratic legitimacy in terms of actors' value of local control of water services; and (3) accountability in terms of the regional actors' capacity to steer in the water sector. This article focuses on three cases in a Swiss region that has experienced water provision challenges due to its highly fragmented water supply structures. We find that reputational power serves as a bridge in our three cases: when the actors responsible for water supply regard potential coordination partners as important, then we observe coordination. In contrast, we do not find conclusive evidence to support the assumption that a fear of losing local control is a barrier for coordination. Instead, our results indicate that accountability, in the form of vertical steering by the regional actors, serves as a bridge for coordination, and that this could help mitigate some of the potentially negative effects of democratic legitimacy perceptions: through convening local actors or providing positive incentives to municipalities to work together, regional actors can foster coordination.

Multiple actors across different institutional levels play a role in water governance. The coordination of these actors is important for effective water governance. However, the joining together of multiple actors can have several implications, such as a redistribution of power across actors, a change in democratic control and citizen influence as well as shifting accountability structures. These implications can involve different barriers and bridges that might impede or foster coordination. Through qualitative and quantitative methods, we assess the following barriers and bridges for coordination: (1) reputational power in terms of who is perceived as important for coordination in the water sector; (2) democratic legitimacy in terms of actors' value of local control of water services; and (3) accountability in terms of the regional actors' capacity to steer in the water sector. This article focuses on three cases in a Swiss region that has experienced water provision challenges due to its highly fragmented water supply structures. We find that reputational power serves as a bridge in our three cases: when the actors responsible for water supply regard potential coordination partners as important, then we observe coordination. In contrast, we do not find conclusive evidence to support the assumption that a fear of losing local control is a barrier for coordination. Instead, our results indicate that accountability, in the form of vertical steering by the regional actors, serves as a bridge for coordination, and that this could help mitigate some of the potentially negative effects of democratic legitimacy perceptions: through convening local actors or providing positive incentives to municipalities to work together, regional actors can foster coordination. ; ISSN:2073-4441

Urban water sectors in industrialised countries are increasingly facing a diverse range of challenges. Aging assets, environmental concerns and economic issues put pressure on the current governance and organisation of these sectors. In recent years, a plethora of neoliberal reforms have been initiated in various countries as efforts to counteract these developments. While rather successful in infrastructure sectors, such as energy or telecommunication, neoliberal reforms have proven difficult in many industrialised, urban water sectors. The article argues that this is related to distinct characteristics of the water sectors. Specificities include large-scale technologies, high externalities and the nature of the good. This article analyses these key characteristics of urban water sectors and shows their implications and challenges for neoliberal reforms by drawing on the privatisation of the English water sectors. The results show key trade-offs between economic and environmental issues, and less with social goals.

The creation of "autonomous operative" organizations – either by privatization or devolution – is a dominant trend of recent public governance reforms. While privatization and devolution affect traditional accountability arrangements based on democratic procedures quite considerably, this is not because the intensity of regulatory mechanisms is decreasing. New market-based accountability mechanisms such as competition, price, and performance are often layered upon existing regulatory regimes, such as organizational boards with elected representatives of the public. The paper contributes to the understanding of the relationship between conflicting principles of procedural and performance accountability by exploring the accountability regimes of autonomous operative organizations: What activities and strategies are applied by differing actors to manage the interface between the organization and their political and social stakeholders? To what extent can differing accountability mechanisms ensure that common good goals are achieved? These questions are addressed by conducting a comparative case study analysis of such salient policy fields as water supply and public housing in two federal states of Germany. ; ISSN:2079-5882

As in other industrialized countries, many urban water social-ecological systems in the United States are characterized by frequent discharges of contaminated runoff, catastrophic flooding, and near-complete severance of the hydrologic cycle. Recent advancements in stormwater best management practices aim to push urban water social-ecological systems into a more sustainable regime that reconnects the hydrologic cycle and utilizes ecosystem services, such as infiltration and evapotranspiration, to improve the quality of urban and suburban water bodies. Collectively, these approaches are termed green infrastructure. As a decentralized approach, green infrastructure requires implementation on, as well as access to, property throughout a watershed, which poses particular governance challenges for watersheds where most land is held privately. We argue that green infrastructure on private property has a strong potential for creating a more sustainable regime through Citizen Stormwater Management, a participatory form of governance with strong citizen influence and engagement. We develop a classification scheme to assess policy instruments' degree of government intervention, citizen participation, and engagement. The paper explores how various policy instruments encourage Citizen Stormwater Management across the United States on both public and private property. We then conduct a textual analysis of ten years of publicly available data from Onondaga County, New York (USA) to assess the implementation of applicable policy instruments. Findings indicate that incentive-based (carrots) along with outreach (sermon) policies can play an important role when regulatory instruments (sticks) are lacking. ; ISSN:2071-1050

Policy preferences are a key element in understanding the policy process. In this article, we conceptualise policy preferences as latent constructs, which can be identified in an inductive way, based on actors' choice of policy instruments and organisational structures. To inductively identify policy preferences, we take an approach based on principal component analysis, informed by theory on preference formation. Using water supply in Switzerland as a case study, we propose an approach based on policy preference spaces to identify preferences based on clusters of choices. Our results show the presence of three distinct policy preferences: 1) local management with regional support, 2) local autonomy, and 3) strong regional management with local financing autonomy. We investigate the factors affecting the formation of these policy preferences through a regression analysis. Our results indicate that preference formation is affected by actor types and, to a lesser degree, by goal priority. In this way, the article makes two distinct contributions to the field. The first is a methodological contribution, through its proposition for measuring and operationalising policy preferences; and the second is a theoretical contribution, in demonstrating how policy preferences are influenced by actor types and goal priority it highlights the context-dependent nature of policy preferences.

The term 'bioeconomy' stands for an economy that primarily relies on renewable biotic resources and thus supports the vision of a low carbon society. The respective 'bioeconomy strategies' bear high conflict potential as they, sometimes unintentionally, rely on forest-land or wood as a resource, which are already appropriated also in other policies. We first outline the resulting governance challenges in terms of coherence of policy goals, consistency of instruments and the congruence between the two and identify trade-offs between forest ecosystem services that exhibit a high conflict potential regarding the bioeconomy. We then provide a comparative analysis of the extent to which bioeconomy strategies tackle the related governance challenges for two pairs of countries from the temperate (Germany and Switzerland) and the boreal (Sweden and Norway) forest zone. We find that the strategies do not mention conflicts related to wood mobilization. Coherence and consistency tend to be addressed for non-extractive forest utilizations that are perceived as a market opportunity rather than solely a restriction on wood mobilization. The latter seems more common in countries with a multi-functional forestry paradigm. Consequences for the prevailing forest management paradigm, however, are not explored in the strategies and thus policy congruence is neglected. ; ISSN:1522-7200

This article emphasizes the importance of actor networks for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and suggests how a network perspective can contribute to our understanding of (global) sustainability governance. Actor networks are often driven by homophily, as actors tend to interact with those similar to them. Yet, not least in a context sustainability governance, heterophily of actor cooperation is claimed to be beneficial. In contrast to homophily, heterophily represents situations where actors cooperate with those that are different, and thus combine diverse sets of knowledge and competences. Based on the case of Swiss actors involved in the implementation of the SDG 6 on water in countries of the global South, we use social network analysis and qualitative interview data to study how homophily and heterophily influence actors' information exchange. According to quantitative network data, information exchange between actors is indeed influenced by homophily regarding the type of actor and the policy forums actors are participating in. Nevertheless, we also find evidence for heterophily, as actors tend to exchange information with actors with different methodological foci. Furthermore, qualitative interview data show that actors perceive heterophilous network ties as beneficial for SDG implementation.