Conference Agenda

Water governance is widely acknowledged as crucial for addressing water-related issues and ensuring the long-term sustainability and resilience of water systems. With an understanding of the social and ecological complexities, multifunctional characteristics of water, and societal interdependencies, water governance has seen a variety of new governance approaches emerge. Inspired by sustainability, democracy, and the complexities and uncertainties involved in governing water systems, labels such as "integrated water resource management," "adaptive water governance," "collaborative water governance," "river basin and catchment management," and "polycentric governance" have been widely promoted as universal solutions, with their effectiveness often taken for granted. However, it remains unclear which of these governance approaches, or combinations thereof, are effective in preserving or restoring environmentally sustainable water resources and ecosystems. Our study aims to create a comprehensive conceptual framework that supports a diagnostic analysis of water governance to determine which governance configurations and contextual factors are necessary for water sustainability performance in preserving or restoring environmentally sustainable water resources and ecosystems.

The conceptual framework illustrates the interconnections between three core elements - water governance paradigms, problématiques, and water governance characteristics - and how interactions among them contribute to sustainability performance under specific contextual factors. Due to the diagnostic nature of the framework, these elements can be further analyzed at different conceptual levels, depending on the guiding policy or empirical questions. In this conceptual paper, we delve deeper into these elements and explore the interconnections between water governance paradigms, problématiques, and water governance characteristics, how these interconnections affect sustainability performance, and the impact of contextual factors. We do this by reviewing existing theoretical and conceptual scholarly contributions in the field of environmental governance. The review of the scholarly work guides the formulation of a set of hypotheses on the relationships between the different elements of the framework.

As water issues are expected to become an increasingly critical problem on a global level, given the rising complexities and unpredictability, this framework contributes to a better understanding of sustainable water governance systems and the dependency of governance performance on context. This will further aid in the creation of more robust and resilient policies and facilitate the governance reform process. The framework aims to guide comparative analysis of water governance systems, with a focus on improving understanding of how different elements of water governance systems determine their sustainability performance and the extent to which contextual factors influence these relationships.

Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystem (WEFE) nexus thinking developed in response to the increasing challenge of declining natural resources. Nexus thinking aims to manage natural resources in a sustainable manner by leveraging synergies and managing trade-offs between domains based on the assumption that all domains are equal. The addition of the ecosystem to the nexus is new. Some scholars argue that the ecosystem should take central stage in the WEFE nexus. One implication is that nexus thinking becomes a transboundary issue, since ecosystem properties often do not match administrative boundaries. This amplifies the complexity of the existing WEFE nexus governance challenges. However, there is little research on the nexus in a transboundary context.

Transboundary governance is mostly addressed top-down and often fails to connect to local realities and reduces the perceived transparency and legitimacy for local actors. However, bottom-up approaches could tackle these issues in the search for solutions. In this vein,[citation removed to anonymize abstract] developed the WEFE nexus governance approach, which puts the ecosystem at the center of the nexus and is strongly rooted in stakeholder co-creation aiming to support the transformation of current governance systems architectures into WEFE nexus oriented governance systems. The approach consists of four building blocks: problem identification; stakeholder dialogue on WEFE goals and policies; designing new policy instruments; implementation. While the approach looks promising, it has not yet been validated in practice.

This research operationalizes and validates the first building block of the WEFE nexus governance approach through a comparative case study of three transboundary river basins: Lielupe, Nestos/Mesta, and Adige river basin from the EU funded NEXOGENESIS project. The building block consists of a governance and policy coherence assessment, for which the Nexus Governance Assessment Tool (NXGAT) and a policy coherence assessment approach were developed. The NXGAT assesses the degree of nexus governance supportiveness of current governance systems architectures, while simultaneously identifying opportunities and barriers towards nexus governance. The policy coherence assessment assesses to what extent the policies from the WEFE nexus domains acknowledge interdependencies between each other, both on paper and in practice.

Our results highlight three novelties. First, the governance and policy assessment stimulate dialogue among local stakeholders, integrating local transboundary interests into WEFE nexus transboundary governance. Second, the NXGAT is suitable for transboundary governance architectures, in spite of the tool not being designed specifically for transboundary contexts. Third, opportunities and barriers identified with the NXGAT assessment offers lessons learned for other river basins.

Private companies’ climate adaptation strategies have often been driven by an economic risk logic and paid little attention to how such practices may affect climate-vulnerable groups in sites of production. Adaptation often influences the distribution of vital resources, such as water and food. Unless carried out in an inclusionary manner, such interventions can contribute to increase vulnerability and lead to maladaptation. Adaptation scholarship has, therefore, increasingly focused on questions of climate justice and equity.

However, there is little research on interactions between public and private interactions on climate adaptation and on the question of how private adaptation may contribute to mitigate or reinforce existing vulnerabilities among societal actors. Moreover, there has been no discussion to date about the question of how emerging transnational governance instruments, such as human rights and environmental due diligence (HREDD) regulations that aim to hold companies accountable for adverse environmental and human rights impacts throughout global supply chains, could be used for ensuring that private adaptation does not come at the cost of societal resilience.

This paper analyzes the adaptation activities of large soy producers in the Brazilian state of Bahía, with a focus on the consequences for smallholders and traditional communities. Soy producers, subsidized by the Brazilian state, have developed large-scale irrigation schemes to adapt to more frequent droughts, which has led to concentration of water use rights and escalated conflicts over scarce water resources in the region. This adaptation strategy has exacerbated the climate vulnerability of smallholders and traditional communities. This case is illustrative of how processes of climate change and economic globalization are often deeply intertwined in rural areas, leading to situations of ”double exposure”.

Based on empirical material collected during fieldwork in Bahía, including qualitative interviews and written primary sources, we first analyze how public and private actors have governed such risks. We analyze how ongoing conflicts are embedded in a context characterized by disarticulated governmental interventions that on the hand seek to improve climate resilience among vulnerable populations in the state, but on the other hand grant water licenses and subsidize irrigation infrastructure to help large producers to cope with climate change. We then discuss how HREDD regulations could contribute to reduce the negative societal impacts of private companies' responses to climate risks.

Water resources worldwide face numerous challenges linked to the climate crisis, environmental degradation and competing anthropogenic pressures. Water governance plays a significant role in addressing these challenges and ensuring the health and sustainable management of water resources. Paradigms serve as the foundation – or source code – of water governance systems, shaping the rules, norms, values, and goals that determine the workings of these systems. As a deep leverage point, intervening at the level of paradigms has the potential for deep-rooted and systemic transformations towards robust and effective water governance. Against this background, we take stock of what we know about the ‘source code of water governance’ and explore how paradigms are analyzed in the academic literature.

By means of a systematic review of journal articles listed in Scopus, we identified 93 journal articles that explicitly studied water governance paradigms. We coded and analyzed these based on the catalogue of questions on general characteristics of the publication and the treatment of water governance paradigms, addressing, for example, the geographical focus, the nature of paradigms, actor groups involved, paradigm dynamics, governance modes, and effects of paradigms.

Some of our main (preliminary) findings include:

• Most papers offer single (or small-N) case analyses of the implementation of specific paradigms, most often Integrated Water Resources Management, with a greater focus on problems, rather than governance solutions; however, only few consider environmental consequences;
• Papers usually focus on the national (or subnational) level, often in the Global South, and the role of state actors, with few looking into transboundary issues;
• Succession of a paradigm is the most-mentioned dynamic, while dynamics within paradigms, such as adaptation or incremental change, are hardly mentioned.

With this study, we offer, to our knowledge, the first holistic and comparative account of water governance paradigms, their characteristics and dynamics, within the broader water governance literature. In that, the findings of our systematic review allow us to map the scientific discourse and provide a first appraisal of what we know about the ‘source code of water governance’. Through this, we aim to set an agenda for further research by identifying gaps in the existing literature and extrapolating new research directions from the review findings.