Conference Agenda

This paper investigates the potential for Sweden to develop a coherent Water Resource Law capable of addressing national hydrological and governance challenges within the framework of the EU Water Acquis. Based on results from the Policylabb Vattenresurslag project and a case study of the Kävlingeån catchment area in southern Sweden, it analyses how fragmented regulation, outdated water judgements, and overlapping institutional mandates limit adaptive water management and local accountability. Through a series of policy labs involving municipal representatives, regional authorities, water utilities, and civil society actors, the study identifies the need for basin-based coordination mechanisms, clarified decision-making authority, and sustainable financing models, including possible water-use fees consistent with the EU’s cost-recovery principles. It also highlights the importance of improved hydrological data, transparency, and participatory governance to enhance legitimacy and effectiveness. Comparative insights from the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Australia reveal viable institutional pathways for balancing centralised legal requirements with regional and local autonomy. The paper concludes that a Swedish Water Resource Law could provide a necessary legal and organisational bridge between EU obligations and national needs, fostering more integrated, equitable, and climate-resilient water governance. Achieving this, however, requires institutional innovation, legal clarity, and a democratic process that reconciles technical efficiency with social legitimacy.

Local water governance faces a persistent scale problem, namely that water challenges unfold across catchment systems, while policy priorities are often formulated and communicated by individual municipalities. This study examines how local water governance priorities converge and diverge across eight municipalities within a Swedish catchment area. To do so, it applies a computational text-analysis approach combining web scraping, SetFit few-shot classification, BERTopic modelling, and natural language processing to collect, filter, and analyse water-related content from municipal websites. The study treats municipal websites as communicative infrastructures through which local governments publicly articulate, legitimize, and operationalize policy priorities. The analysis identifies twenty water-related topics, clustered into four broader priority themes: (i) climate adaptation, biodiversity, and blue-green infrastructure; (ii) municipal water and wastewater infrastructure; (iii) regulatory protection of water resources and aquatic environments; and (iv) water-related health, energy, and preparedness concerns. By comparing how these themes appear across municipalities, the study provides insight into the conditions for coordinated catchment governance, as well as potential fragmentation, blind spots, and mismatches. The paper contributes both empirically and methodologically by demonstrating how web-based data and NLP methods can support the identification of local water governance priorities at catchment scale.

Water protection areas (WPAs) are legal instruments that require fixed boundaries that can be clearly defined on a map. Groundwater systems, however, are not fixed. Groundwater capture zones expand, contract, and shift with pumping, while groundwater flow changes with seasons, climate, and land use. In practice, some older protection areas follow roads, property boundaries, or other convenient surface features that do not necessarily match how water flows underground.

This mismatch is difficult to resolve because groundwater is hard to observe. Unlike surface water such as lakes, rivers, and streams, it cannot be easily monitored, and data are often sparse. Investigations are typically based on a limited number of wells and define a single boundary for the contributing area, even when the data support several plausible flow patterns. This is often referred to as the non-uniqueness problem, where multiple interpretations can explain the same observations. As a result, relying on a single interpretation may give a false sense of certainty, while alternative flow paths and associated risks, such as contamination, remain unaccounted for.

Using the Swedish context of groundwater protection areas, this presentation explores what happens when a dynamic and only partially observable system is regulated through static policy instruments. One consequence is a risk that uncertain hydrogeologic interpretations come to be treated as settled fact once translated into fixed legal boundaries. This can lead to underprotection of areas that may contribute to a drinking water source and overregulation of areas that are easier to define on a map but less important from a groundwater perspective. This raises the question of whether WPAs should be treated as revisable risk-management instruments. This implies a more explicit treatment of uncertainty, considering multiple plausible interpretations rather than a single deterministic one, along with periodic revision as abstraction, land use, and climate change evolve.

Inspired by fertilizer use, we investigate behavior in settings where externalities arise from individual activities crossing an uncertain individual threshold. We show within an analytic model that only threshold uncertainty causes individual and social interests to diverge with individuals accepting a larger probability of crossing the threshold than is socially optimal. We then theoretically investigate the impact of information on thresholds as well as taxing the caused externalities for fertilizer use. We test our predictions within an experiment with Swedish farmers. The data collection will take place in winter 2025/2026.

This article examines the use and omission of human rights and justice terminology in national water strategies and the potential implications for policy impact, social equity, and alignment with international standards. Despite global recognition of water as a human right (UNGA 2010), national policies vary widely in their use of rights-based and justice-oriented language. Through a comparative analysis of water strategies from diverse geopolitical and socio-economic contexts, this study categorises the different approaches to terminology: a) explicit use of human rights and justice language, b) implicit integration of human rights and justice principles, and c) complete omission of rights- and justice-based framing. A working hypothesis suggests that countries with explicit human rights language in water strategies tend to prioritise equitable access to water and may foster greater public accountability. Conversely, nations that exclude these terms often face challenges in promoting equity and inclusivity in water access, potentially marginalising vulnerable communities. Factors influencing terminology choices include political sensitivities, enforcement capacities, and alignment with international frameworks like the various UN conventions on human rights, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the EU Water Directive. This study underscores the significance of terminology in shaping water policy effectiveness and advocates for integrating human rights language to enhance both national and global water justice outcomes. The article concludes with recommendations for policymakers to adopt rights-based language as a step toward more inclusive, just, and effective water governance.