In this blog, Dr Kerry Waylen, a senior researcher in the Social, Economic and Geographical Sciences Department at the James Hutton Institute, discusses the practical difficulties in aligning approaches to protect and improve water quality and ecology alongside those for managing flood risk.
For the past 6 years my colleagues and I have been studying if and how we can better join up delivery of different goals for water management, i.e. for improving water quality and quantity. During that time, I’ve often found myself thinking of the Scarlet Pimpernel – a fictional 18th century aristocratic hero with a secret identity – specifically the quote “they seek him here, they seek him there, ….That demned elusive Pimpernel”. However, I realise that may be an obscure reference so let me explain!
Our project was created in response to a policy-maker interest in jointly integrating the delivery of goals for water quality (set by the Water Framework Directive, WFD) and for Flood Risk Management (as per the Floods Directive or FD). Taking a more ‘joined up’ approach could also extend further and encompass other policy goals – including, but not limited to, species and habitats designated as protected under environmental policies and the priorities of local communities. This idea of being ‘joined up’ – of improving policy integration or coherence – promises more efficient and effective ways of working and is needed when trying to tackle complex problems.
Lake at Glensaugh. Credit: Macaulay Land Use Research Institute
The aspiration of becoming more ‘joined up’ sounds such a good idea that it is formally supported by many countries, especially in Europe. Therefore, we started by studying the plans made under the WFD and FD in selected European countries ranging from the Czech Republic to Sweden. We looked for content related to other policy topics and cross-references to other plans; for example in a plan focused on improving water quality, was there any mention of managing flood risk . After much searching – we had 158 plans to get through because each country typically makes many sub-national plans - we were a bit disappointed. If integration was happening, it wasn’t very obvious in the plans.
However, we felt it was quite likely that more activities might be happening than are described within plans, so for 6 countries we decided to interview those working in environmental departments and agencies charged with implementing the policies. The Flemish Region of Belgium has integrated their goals into one law, but most countries have kept the high-level policies separate and were instead focused on integrating the goals via policy implementation – known as policy coherence. In total we carried out 28 interviews with policy-makers across the UK, Sweden and Flanders. By carrying out these interviews we found several experiences or ideas of initiatives thought to be helpful for achieving a more joined up approach and these are shown in the table.
Table: Initiatives undertaken by European policy-makers for water policy integration: X represents the presence of an initiative in at least 1 case, FRMP – Flood Risk Management Plans and RBMPs - River Basin Management Plans.
This table is reproduced from our paper at: http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/w11030598
Staff charged with policy implementation were keen to support integration, and most we spoke to had tried to organise related activities. However, many of these interviewees also told us that integrating goals might better be achieved at a lower level, at the catchment or sub-catchment scale (also called river basins and watersheds).
Therefore, for the last phase of our work we studied catchment partnerships. We studied documents and interviewed partners associated with 4 non-statutory UK partnerships, to understand if and how they achieved this. We found partnerships do seem to be relevant to this challenge: they were all slowly making progress in delivering tricky multi-benefit and multi-partner activities such as Natural Flood Management and tackling diffuse pollution (see our full report). However, partnerships themselves are not able to transcend the constraints of other levels, and indeed are entangled with that wider governance system. For example, agencies are often key actors in partnerships, and the funding needed to put plans into practice often comes from public grants made available to support the delivery of a particular policy. Not unreasonably partnerships themselves seek more and more sustained support from policy resources and structures to better enable their work.
To some extent, the idea of policy integration thus always seemed to be somebody else’s responsibility or competency. Everyone we asked agreed that it was a very good idea, albeit not necessarily that they themselves could do much to achieve and offered suggestions about who else might be able to do better. The net impression is that the solutions always are to be found elsewhere, to be implemented by somebody else, what some term ‘responsibility-shifting’. We seek integration here, we seek integration there: that is why I found myself thinking of that “demned elusive pimpernel” – a character that famously eluded capture!
The challenge of how integrate is not unique to these two particular policies, nor indeed water management. There is a substantial literature on policy integration (for example Jordan & Lenschow, 2010) that shows how hard it is to get environmental priorities into policy domains such as transport, as it causes additional difficulty in the short term, even if it should improve outcomes and efficiencies in the longer-term.
I am also reminded of my own prior work on implementing the Ecosystem Approach. This concept for holistic inclusive environmental management was often expected to be delivered by relatively small short-term projects, that were inevitably affected by prior and parallel initiatives at higher governance levels. Unsurprisingly, these relatively small scale projects working by themselves were typically unable to achieve all the ideals of the Ecosystem Approach.
Such challenges are indeed just a normal part of environmental governance: we should expect that problems can and should be shared, but not devolved away. Many scholars working on environmental governance have called for decision-making on the environment to be more distributed across social groups, some advocating this as a normative goal. If you are interested to read more, a good discussion of viewpoints on involving multiple actors in governance is contained within Morrison et al., 2019.
Our experiences working on water integration also emphasises that distributed responsibility is simply a practical necessity when trying to intervene in complex systems such as catchments. However, commentators who highlight ‘responsibility-shifting’ have observed a tendency for high-level policy-makers to devolve responsibility ‘down’ to more local level organisations, such as local communities and small-scale partnerships. As an example, see Rolfe (2018)’s study of Localism in England and Community Empowerment in Scotland. It is not reasonable to expect that lower-level actors hold all the answers, nor that they have capacity to handle the responsibility.
Ultimately it is really important that we don’t equate the need to distribute responsibility with devolved responsibility. Tackling problems such as integrated water management will likely involve all the original ‘owners’ of problems – e.g. policy departments and agencies – as well as those working in other connected sectors and at a range of levels.
Tackling complex challenges like integration depends on a myriad of activities by committed individuals, who invested in building relationships, sharing knowledge, and coordinating planning across teams, departments and organisations. These activities can be relatively ‘invisible’ in external and even internal reporting (e.g. job appraisals). These means that time and training to support this may be scarce – especially if budgets come under pressure, as is the case for many statutory bodies during times of public austerity. New technologies or specific innovations often attract publicity and expectations, but academics studying environmental management have long warned that such ‘silver bullet’ solutions rarely exist. Likewise, we found there were no specific innovations or practices that ‘unlocked’ and improved integration. Instead, integration may best be enabled by attending to and strengthening networking, planning and project management.
Anyone expecting another group or initiative to achieve all the changes we’d like to see for sustainability, must look back at themselves and ask what they could also do to enable change. In the Scarlet Pimpernel stories, it actually took a League working together to achieve and enable his daring successes, using coordinated teamwork rather than novel technologies or initiatives – and it will be the same for achieving success in sustainability.
Project team: Kirsty Blackstock, Alba Juarez-Bourke, Keith Marshall.