Going Dutch. the Impact of the Water Framework Directive On Collective-Choice Rules for Integrated River Basin Management

At the drafting stage of the Water Framework Directive (WFD; European Communities, 2000), Dutch water policy officials attempted to upload domestic practices. Due to the politically delicate negotiations, the final WFD text includes ambiguous objectives and principles. This paper analyses how the Dutch nation state has dealt with the deviations from their proposals and the room for manoeuvre that the WFD’s ambiguities offer. It presents the conclusions of the author’s dissertation on the impact of the WFD on Dutch collective-choice rules for Integrated River Basin Management.

To track incremental changes in collective-choice rules over time, the author has translated the seven rule types of the Institutional Analysis and Development framework (Kiser and Ostrom Ostrom, 1982; Ostrom, 1999, 2005) into ideal-types as related to the integrated river basin management concept.  These ideal-types are incorporated in the Policy Arrangement Approach (PAA; Arts, Van Tatenhove, and Leroy, 2000; Leroy and Arts, 2006) as elaboration of its rules of the game dimension (see Figure 1). Observations on the rules over the 1990 till 2009 period are related to developments in the other three PAA’s dimensions, i.e. resource and power, actors, and policy discourse, in order to provide for potential explanations on continuity or change.

The WFD’s implementation planning process has not triggered significant rules changes in the Netherlands. The uncertainty about the socio-economic impact of the deviations has contributed to both domestic resistance towards too much legally binding restrictions and accommodation to prior collective-choice rules.