Polycentric Water Governance in Spain E-Book

Nora Schütze

• Herausgeber: transcript Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Edition Politik
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 521

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Increasing irrigation efficiency has been high on the political agenda in Spain for many years. However, the overarching aim to reduce agricultural water consumption has not been met so far. To explore this phenomenon, Nora Schütze investigates processes of coordination between the water and agricultural sector in three Spanish river basins in the context of the EU Water Framework Directive implementation. From the perspective of polycentric governance, she identifies multiple mechanisms which illustrate how and why actors interact in certain ways, and thus shows why environmental aims of the Water Framework Directive remain unachieved.

Leseprobe

Nora Schütze (Dr. rer. pol.) is a research associate at University of Kassel, where she also completed her PhD dissertation. Her research interests include natural resource governance with a particular focus on water and land, as well as polycentric governance, policy analysis and institutional analysis.

Nora Schütze

Polycentric Water Governance in Spain

Understanding Determinants, Patterns, and Performance of Coordination

This work was submitted as dissertation to the Faculty of Organic Agricultural Sciences at the University of Kassel under the title “Analysing determinants, patterns of interaction, and performance of polycentric water governance in Spain”. Place: Witzenhausen

Date of defense: 06.07.2022

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (BY) license, which means that the text may be remixed, transformed and built upon and be copied and redistributed in any medium or format even commercially, provided credit is given to the author.

Creative Commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures, photos, excerpts, etc.) not original to the Open Access publication and further permission may be required from the rights holder. The obligation to research and clear permission lies solely with the party re-using the material.

First published in 2023 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

© Nora Schütze

Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld

Printed by: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar

https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839466896

Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-6689-2

PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-6689-6

EPUB-ISBN 978-3-7328-6689-2

ISSN of series: 2702-9050

eISSN of series: 2702-9069

Contents

Acknowledgements

1.Introduction

1.1Applying polycentricity to the study of coordination in water governance

1.2Empirical research context

1.3Aims and outline of the book

1.4Structure of the book

2.Conceptual Framework

2.1Introducing key theoretical concepts

2.1.1Public administration literature and coordination

2.1.2Institutional analysis and coordination

2.2Development of the conceptual framework

2.2.1Structure of polycentric governance

2.2.2Processes of mutual adjustment in polycentric governance

2.2.3Performance of polycentric governance

3.Research Design and Methodology

3.1Comparative case study design

3.1.1Selection of case studies and cross-case comparison

3.1.2Selection of Action Situations for within-case analysis

3.2Collection and analysis of data

3.2.1Data collection in case studies

3.2.2Data analysis

3.2.3Assessment of variables

4.Empirical Analysis of the Guadalquivir

4.1Independent variables specific to the case study

4.1.1Contextual conditions

4.1.2Characteristics of heterogeneous actors

4.2Analysing and evaluating Action Situations

4.2.1Development of the River Basin Management Plan

4.2.2Dam Release Commission

4.2.3Increasing irrigation efficiency

4.2.4Reduction of water rights

4.3Performance across Action Situations

5.Empirical Analysis of the Jucar

5.1Independent variables specific to the case study

5.1.1Contextual conditions

5.1.2Characteristics of heterogeneous actors

5.2Analysing and evaluating Action Situations

5.2.1Development of the River Basin Management Plan

5.2.2Dam Release Commissions

5.2.3Increasing irrigation efficiency

5.2.4Reduction of water rights

5.3Performance across Action Situations

6.Empirical Analysis of the Mediterranean Basins of Andalusia

6.1Independent variables specific to the case study

6.1.1Contextual conditions

6.1.2Characteristics of heterogeneous actors

6.2Analysing and evaluating Action Situations

6.2.1Development of the River Basin Management Plan

6.2.2Management Committees

6.2.3Increasing irrigation efficiency

6.2.4Demand and supply of desalinated water

6.2.5Reduction of water rights

6.3Performance across Action Situations

7.Comparative Analysis and Conclusion

7.1Characterizing patterns of interaction

7.1.1Comparison ofpatterns of interaction across cases

7.1.2Patterns of interaction in individual case studies

7.2Linking independent variables and patterns of interaction

7.2.1Variables supporting hierarchy

7.2.2Variables supporting competition

7.2.3Variables supporting cooperation

7.2.4Variables supporting further patterns of interaction

7.3From patterns of interaction to performance

7.3.1Role of patterns of interaction for process performance

7.3.2Role of patterns of interaction for policy output performance

7.3.3Relation between process, output, and environmental outcome performance

7.4Summarizing the evidence: theoretical and empirical conclusions

7.4.1Theoretical conclusions

7.4.2Empirical conclusions

7.5Strengths and limitations of this study

7.6Further research

References

List of Tables

List of Figures

List of abbreviations and acronyms

Appendix 1: Case selection process

Appendix 2: List of interviews

Acknowledgements

Writing my PhD dissertation was an inspiring, exciting but also challenging endeavour. Many people accompanied and supported me during these years, to whom I would like to express my sincere gratitude.

First of all, I am deeply thankful to my first supervisor, Prof. Dr. Andreas Thiel, who introduced me to the field of polycentric governance and sparked my interest on the Guadalquivir, opened many doors for my professional development, and was a great source of inspiration. Thank you for making this entire process possible. Further, I am very thankful to all my inspiring colleagues from the STEER research project, where I learned how fruitful intense coordination can be, academically and personally. In particular, I want to mention here Ines Dombrowsky, Andrea Lenschow, Claudia Pahl-Wostl and Christian Knieper, as well as my great PhD colleagues Evelyn Lukat, Franziska Meergans and Mirja Schoderer for the many discussions on my PhD project. Furthermore, I am thankful to Elisa Kochskämper and Jens Newig – I am not sure whether I would have been interested in pursuing a PhD, let alone in the field of (Spanish) water governance without my experience at the research group at Leuphana University. Thanks a lot also to Sergio Villamayor-Tomas for taking over the role as second examiner of my thesis, and to Tobias Plieninger and (once again) to Andrea Lenschow for being part of my PhD committee.

This work would not have been possible without the many people whom I interviewed in Spain, and those who facilitated my field work. A special thanks therefore to Pilar Paneque and Jesús Vargas for supporting and receiving me at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide. Thanks also to Leandro Del Moral and Ramiro Martinez who put me in contact with so many inspiring persons in the Guadalquivir and the Jucar, respectively.

I received indispensable support from wonderful colleagues and dear friends, who made my PhD also a very enjoyable journey despite many challenges. A huge thanks goes to my colleagues Arvind Lakshmisha – thanks for having been the best office colleague I could have wished for! – , Ariane Götz, Sören Köpke and Christian Schleyer for their scientific and moral support in the last years; as well as to the rest of the team of the Section of International Agricultural Policy and Environmental Governance at the University of Kassel. Further, a deep thanks goes to my colleagues “from above”, who have also become close friends: Maren Busch (I cannot thank you enough!), Matthias Middendorf and Tanja Matheis; as well as to Ronja Hüppe.

I also wish to thank my friends who are always with me, for so many years already, especially Johanna, Lisa, and Barbara; and my Kassel friends who have accompanied me in the last years while writing my PhD: Alena, Annika, Lara, May-Britt and Paula for all your support, not only but also during very tough times of the pandemic. Thank you, Baltasar, for supporting me in such a wonderful way in getting the thesis done & and for (literally) going through this time together. Last, I wish to deeply thank Fabian, Felix, Susanne, my wonderful grandmother, and my parents who, it seems, triggered my interest in combining legal and policy-related questions with issues of environmental planning.

1.Introduction

The governance of water necessarily requires coordination across policy sectors to deal with interlinkages and trade-offs between different types of water uses. In terms of water quantity, for example, it is to coordinate the often-competing demands of human resource use, such as agriculture, energy production, tourism, or urban water use; as well as balancing these uses with the protection of ecosystems. Furthermore, water crosses administrative boundaries, asking for coordination across jurisdictional scales, from the local to the national and international level. The importance of coordination has been recognized for decades, but is still seen as one of the major challenges in water governance (Pahl-Wostl 2015). This is also why the water crisis we are facing (Vörösmarty et al. 2010) is often seen as a crisis of governance rather than one of physical resources (Gupta, Pahl-Wostl, and Zondervan 2013).

To address these needs for coordination, different governance approaches are used by scientists and policymakers. These are, most prominently, the concept of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM), which aims at coordinating water resources across sectors and at different scales, while recognizing interests of competing user groups (Global Water Partnership 2009); as well as the Water-Energy-Food Nexus, focusing on managing and reducing trade-offs, and increasing synergies across sectors (Weitz et al. 2017; Benson, Gain, and Rouillard 2015). These approaches have certainly been important in terms of improving the understanding on interdependencies between different water-using sectors. However, despite of their strong focus on cross-sectoral and cross-level coordination, conceptualizations and theorizing of coordination remains vague. Furthermore, the WEF nexus, as well as related literature on coordination of natural resources, has been criticized for weak accounting of policy-making processes that the nexus approach ultimately aims to influence (Weitz et al. 2017); as well as for not sufficiently considering the role of institutions in shaping outcomes (Villamayor-Tomas et al. 2015), and conditions for effective coordination (Srigiri and Dombrowsky 2022).

This study therefore aims to conceptualize coordination of actors in water governance from the perspective of polycentric governance (Thiel, Blomquist, and Garrick 2019; V. Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren 1961), building on the Bloomington School of Political Economy. This approach analytically distinguishes between various forms of coordination, such as competition, hierarchy, or cooperation, thereby helping to understand the complexity of how actors may interact and coordinate in different contexts and governance settings. Theoretical research gaps remain on how these different forms of coordination come about, how they overlap and co-exist, as well as how they perform. This research project aims to contribute to filling these research gaps by undertaking a comparative case study of three Spanish River Basin Districts on the coordination between the water and agricultural sectors. The empirical context is the European Union (EU) Water Framework Directive (WFD) implementation, and related processes to reduce agricultural water consumption, presenting one of the main pressures on Spanish water bodies. The cases lend themselves well to the analytical framework, since reasons why environmental objectives of the WFD remain largely unachieved in Spain are often traced to the lack of cross-sectoral and cross-level coordination (Lopez-Gunn et al. 2012; Corominas and Cuevas 2017). However, it remains unclear how actors eventually interact; and where, between whom and why alleged deficiencies in coordination occur.

In the next section, I briefly introduce literature on coordination in polycentric governance. This is followed by presenting the empirical research context, i.e., the WFD implementation in Spain and measures to reduce agricultural water consumption. I then present the research questions and main aims of this study. The chapter concludes by outlining the structure of this book.

1.1Applying polycentricity to the study of coordination in water governance

The concept of polycentricity goes back to the seminal work of V.Ostrom, Tiebout and Warren (1961), which has since inspired scholars to analyse collective-action problems related to the production and provision of public goods and services at multiple scales. Polycentric governance, as it is used in this study, relates to multiple, overlapping decision-making centres at different scales which exercise “considerable independence to make norms and rules within a specific domain” (E. Ostrom 2010b: 552). These decision-making centres take each other into account and mutually adjust to each other through processes of cooperation, competition, and hierarchy (Thiel et al. unpublished manuscript; V. Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren 1961).

Many scholars take a normative approach to polycentricity, arguing that polycentric governance is conducive for strengthening coordination of competing resource uses (Kellner, Oberlack, and Gerber 2019), improving institutional fit (Carlisle and Gruby 2017), or more generally, for supporting sustainable use of resources (Pahl-Wostl 2015). This study, however, adopts the view that all governance arrangements and political systems are polycentric (Berardo and Lubell 2019); and, that polycentric governance is not a panacea, but that its performance has to be rigorously studied (E. Ostrom 2010b). Given this background, this study builds on the polycentricity framework developed by Thiel et al. (2019: 10), who use polycentricity as a “lens for viewing the world”. This book thereby aims to analyse interactions of diverse decision-making centres at multiple scales; the role of, inter alia, environmental contexts, formal and informal rules, and characteristics of social problems; as well as how these actors ultimately perform in terms of producing and providing public goods and services (Thiel, Blomquist, and Garrick 2019).

In order to understand the many different nuanced ways in which actors interact and coordinate, this study distinguishes between three ideal types, or pure forms of coordination, namely hierarchy, competition, and cooperation, as well as hybrids which combine these pure forms of coordination in different ways (Thiel et al. unpublished manuscript; Bouckaert, Peters, and Verhoest 2010; Thompson et al. 1991). Further, I use three additional categories of interaction, namely exchange of information, conflicts, and gaps in interactions. Coordination is thus seen as an umbrella term for different forms of interaction.

To analyse these different types of coordination, I apply Ostrom’s (2005) Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework. While the IAD has been developed to study collective action of natural resource users, it can similarly be used to study policy processes at higher analytical levels (Schlager 2007). I make use of two important conceptual tools of the IAD Framework. These are Action Situations, the corner stone of the IAD Framework, understood as social space where actors engage with each other, creating patterns of interaction and where they produce joint outcomes (E. Ostrom 2005). Further, I apply the rule typology that is equally part of the IAD Framework, to understand how different formal and informal rules shape actors’ incentives, and thereby structure the different types of interaction outlined above (E. Ostrom 2005).

Many scholars have applied polycentric governance approaches to study coordination of actors in the context of interrelated natural resource uses (Villamayor-Tomas 2018; Baldwin et al. 2018). Nonetheless, important research gaps remain. First, within the polycentric governance literature, many different sub-forms of coordination are used to conceptualize actors’ interaction, such as cooperation, competition, conflict and conflict resolution (Koontz et al. 2019), cooperation, coercion and competition (Srigiri and Dombrowsky 2022), or collaboration (Jordan, Huitema, Schoenefeld, et al. 2018). However, there is a research gap on how these different forms of coordination relate to each other, as well as how they co-exist and overlap. Furthermore, there has been little research on how governance structures influence processes of polycentric governance in general (Lubell, Robins, and Wang 2014), and different types of coordination in particular. A further important research gap relates to performance of polycentric governance. More empirical and theoretical research is therefore needed on how constitutional rules (Thiel 2017), interests of actors (Kellner, Oberlack, and Gerber 2019), as well as processes (Thiel 2017) relate to performance of polycentric governance.

1.2Empirical research context

The analytical framework will be applied to three case studies on the coordination between the water and agricultural sectors in the context of the WFD implementation in Spain. The empirical focus is on decision-making processes represented as Action Situations in the context of reducing agricultural water consumption. Coordination between public, private and civil society actors of the water and agricultural sector, and from different jurisdictional levels, is thereby fundamental. The three case studies under investigation are the River Basin Districts (RBDs) Guadalquivir, Jucar, and Mediterranean Basins of Andalusia (hereafter: Mediterranean Basins).1 The time frame of the empirical analysis ranges from 2009 to 2019. The three cases show differences regarding their governance structure as well as their performance in terms of reducing agricultural water consumption. They are studied from a comparative perspective.

Implementation of the Water Framework Directive

The WFD, adopted in 2000, defines a framework for river basin management (RBM) and can be seen as one of the most ambitious environmental regulations of the EU. It asks Member States to achieve a “good water status” of all surface and groundwater bodies by 2027. Every six years, Member States must develop River Basin Management Plans (RBMPs), presenting a thorough analysis of the respective RBD, including inter alia an assessment of main pressures on water bodies as well as a so-called Programme of Measure. The latter defines measures that are to be implemented in the respective planning cycle, and which shall contribute to achieving environmental objectives of the WFD (Art. 11, WFD). RBMPs are reported to and evaluated by the European Commission every six years. Since the WFD is a framework directive, it only defines overarching aims, while leeway is given to Member States on how they can be achieved (Newig and Koontz 2014).

The WFD has considerably changed water management in Member States by introducing the principle of integrated water management and aiming at the holistic protection of aquatic ecosystems (European Commission 2019a). This approach inter alia includes the management of water resources at the river basin level instead of at administrative scales; and asks for public participation by actively involving all interested parties in the development of RBMPs (Art. 14, WFD). The WFD was thus an important driver in enabling institutional change (Thiel 2015). Given this innovative character and the very ambitious environmental objectives, the WFD has often been praised for presenting a paradigm shift in European water protection (Voulvoulis, Arpon, and Giakoumis 2017).

In Spain, the introduction of the WFD also implied significant changes, asking authorities to move away from a focus of increasing supply for economic purposes to achieving a good status of water bodies. This indeed represented an important shift, with Spanish water management having been based on the so-called hydraulic paradigm throughout the 20th century (Saurí et al. 2001; López-Gunn 2009). Water management was thus characterized by large-scale state interventions of hydraulic infrastructure, with the overall aim to supply water for economic growth. Beneficiaries of this paradigm were, most of all, irrigators, hydroelectric companies, and public infrastructure developers (Martínez-Fernández et al. 2020). An important further characteristic of this hydraulic paradigm was the privileged access of traditional water users, such as agricultural Water User Associations (WUAs), in decision-making bodies of the different River Basin Authorities (RBAs) (López-Gunn 2009).

When introducing the WFD, Spain was able to build on a governance structure that was already in line with several principles of the WFD. Indeed, the Spanish Government set up the first RBA in the country, the Confederación Hidrográfica del Ebro, in 1926; RBAs for all other surface waters were introduced in the following two decades. Furthermore, irrigators and other traditional water users were included in decision-making bodies of the RBAs. Although being restricted to economic users, some participation was thereby ensured. River basin planning was then introduced by the 1985 National Water Law, leading to the adoption of the first RBMPs in 1998, i.e., eleven years before the first WFD planning cycle started.

More than twenty years after adoption of the WFD, and more than ten years after first RBMPs came into force, environmental objectives are far from achieved, both in Spain and in most of the Member States (European Commission 2019a). In Spain, 25% of groundwater bodies risk to fail good quantitative status; and 30 to 70% of natural rivers in Spanish RBDs are in a status less than good (European Commission 2019b). An important reason for failing to achieve environmental objectives of both groundwater as well as surface waters is the high water abstraction by agriculture (European Commission 2019b).2 Indeed, agriculture represents between 70% and 88% of total water demand in the three RBDs under investigation, the Guadalquivir, Jucar and the Mediterranean (CHG 2015a; Junta de Andalucía 2015a; CHJ 2014a).

In this context, it is important to mention that water quantity issues are not directly included in the assessment of water status of surface water bodies. Baranyai (2019: 10) therefore criticizes that the WFD and other European environmental laws “almost completely ignore quantitative issues”. Nonetheless, the control of water quantity is considered an “ancillary element in securing good water quality” of surface water, which is why “measures on quantity [...] should also be established” (WFD Recital 19). Indeed, ecological flows are required to ensure the maintenance of particular environmental functions in a river ecosystem (Molle, Wester, and Hirsch 2010); and achieving the good ecological status is unlikely if water abstractions are significant (Acreman et al. 2010). Since the second planning cycle, Member States are therefore asked to implement ecological flows. Ecological flows are considered as a hydrological regime which is “consistent with the achievement of the environmental objectives of the WFD in natural surface water bodies” (European Commission 2015a: 3). In relation to groundwater, the quantitative status is an integral part of the assessment of water bodies.

There is broad research on cross-sectoral and cross-level coordination in the context of the WFD implementation (Junier and Mostert 2012; Hüesker and Moss 2015), as well as on reasons for the lack of achieving WFD objectives (Moss et al. 2020; Zingraff-Hamed et al. 2020). In a meta-analysis on scholarship on the WFD implementation, Boeuf and Fritsch (2016) identify a research gap on the governance of water quantity issues, which is arguably due to the fact that research is dominated by northern European countries suffering from water quality problems. Further, the link between implementation processes and environmental outcomes remains understudied (Boeuf and Fritsch 2016). Therefore, Zingraff-Hamed et al. (2020) argue for more in-depth, qualitative research on institutional barriers of WFD implementation.

Increasing irrigation efficiency and the “lack of coordination”

In the context of high water abstractions by agriculture in Spain and the failure to achieve WFD objectives, reducing agricultural water consumption seems to be crucial. Many different governance approaches exist to fostering sustainable agricultural water use. These are, for example, implementation of quotas, water pricing, subsidizing high-tech irrigation infrastructure (Perry 2019), or so-called buybacks, where water users receive financial compensation for giving up their water rights (Perez-Blanco, Hrast-Essenfelder, and Perry 2020). At the farm level, strategies to cope with reduced water availability include changing cropping patterns to less water-intensive crops, use of drought-resistant seeds, conservation agriculture, and implementing water saving-technologies (IPCC 2022a).

The most prominent measure among these is probably the implementation of irrigation efficiency measures, in Spain but also worldwide (Venot 2017). Indeed, the implementation of irrigation efficiency in Spain has been high on the political agenda for almost three decades – usually framed and known as “modernization of irrigation” among scholars (Berbel and Gutiérrez-Martín 2017a; López-Gunn, Mayor, and Dumont 2012), and in the policy debate (WWF/Adena 2015). However, there are no clear legal definitions on what exactly is included under “modernization” (Embid 2017). Furthermore, the term modernization as such is value-laden, based on normative assumptions that something is deficient and needs to be improved. For these reasons I do not use the term throughout this book. Instead, I speak about “increasing irrigation efficiency”, thereby referring to the replacement of surface and sprinkler irrigation by drip irrigation, as well as the replacement of irrigation canals and ditches with pipes.

Measures on irrigation efficiency are included in the Spanish RBMPs and are considered important to achieve environmental objectives of the WFD (MITECO 2021). They are largely financed through the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD) and corresponding Rural Development Programs (RDPs) of the regions. From 2000 to 2010, the European Commission, national and regional governments, as well as farmers invested around EUR 3.815 Million in irrigation infrastructure measures in Spain, covering 1.5 Million hectares (Berbel and Gutiérrez-Martín 2017b).

The main justification for these public investments has been, and still is, the overarching aim to save water (Embid 2017). However, despite high public investments, water consumption at the basin level has increased in several Spanish RBDs (Sampedro Sánchez 2020; Lecina et al. 2010), as well as in many countries worldwide (Grafton et al. 2018). Indeed, while the implementation of drip irrigation potentially allows to use less water at the farm level without compromising in yields, these water savings do not necessarily result in savings at the basin level (van der Kooij et al. 2013).

In this context, it is important to understand the physical water cycle in agriculture. Agricultural water use consists of a consumed fraction (i.e., evaporation and transpiration), which is consumed for growing crops; as well as a non-consumed fraction (Perry 2019). The latter can be subdivided in a recoverable fraction and a non-recoverable fraction. The recoverable fraction consists of flows which return to the river system, and which can therefore be used either by downstream users or for environmental uses, such as environmental flows or aquifer recharges. The non-recoverable fraction is understood as water that is lost for further uses, such as water flowing to the sea, or into deep aquifers that cannot be exploited either for economic or physical reasons (Perry 2019).

From the perspective of the individual farmer, the non-consumed fraction in general presents a water loss – regardless of whether some share of it can still be used elsewhere by other users. An increase in efficiency of irrigation systems thus means that more water that is applied to the field can be consumed for the growing of crops; less water is therefore “lost” for the famer. In many cases, farmers are incentivized to make use of the possibility to consume more water, either by changing towards more water-intensive crops or expanding irrigated surface area. This change in behaviour induced by efficiency improvements is known as the rebound effect (Paul et al. 2019). It results in reduced water availability downstream, and ultimately leads to a relative or absolute increase of agricultural water consumption at the basin level (Grafton et al. 2018). The European Court of Auditors (2021: 42) calls this the “hydrological paradox”, where “increased irrigation efficiency may reduce the return of surface water to rivers, decreasing base flows that are beneficial to downstream users and sensitive ecosystem”.

Perez-Blanco et al. (2020: 230) argue that the two goals of stabilizing agricultural production and increasing water conservation are “generally incompatible” unless complementary policy measures are implemented. These measures include establishing a water accounting system that measures withdrawals, consumption and return flows (Perry and Steduto 2017), and which makes transparent “who gets what and where” (Grafton et al. 2018: 750). Second, limits to water allocation need to be determined. Only if these two measures were fulfilled, measures such as drip irrigation could be effectively introduced with the aim of reducing overall water consumption (Perry and Steduto 2017; Grafton et al. 2018).

It is in this context that the Spanish RBMPs stipulate to accompany subsidies to increase irrigation efficiency with a reduction of water rights. Indeed, also the RBMP of the three RBDs include measures on so-called “water rights revision” (CHG 2015b; CHJ 2015a; Junta de Andalucía 2015a). Significant coordination between the water and agricultural administration is thus required. This is because subsidies for irrigation efficiency are financed through RDPs and hence also administered by agricultural administrations, while the management of water rights falls under the competency of RBAs in Spain. However, the European Commission (2015b) reported that this water rights reduction has most often not been implemented, which is seen as key reason why public investments in irrigation efficiency did not result in expected water savings at the basin level (Sampedro Sánchez 2020; Corominas and Cuevas 2017).

Scholars explain the lack of water rights reduction with deficiencies in cross-sectoral and cross-level coordination (Lopez-Gunn et al. 2012; Corominas and Cuevas 2017); and also among policy-makers, this is a recurring claim. In an interview with a representative from the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, the interviewee even states: “I think that it’s difficult that this [problem of coordination] is as big as in Spain” (Interview 22/2018). Yet, also in other Member States, the failure to achieve environmental objectives of the WFD is explained by weakness in cross-sectoral communication and collaboration (Zingraff-Hamed et al. 2020). Despite this frequently mentioned criticism, it remains unclear where exactly these gaps in day-to-day decision-making regarding coordination of increasing irrigation efficiency and reducing water rights arises (Schütze, Thiel, and Villamayor-Tomas 2022); as well as which actors in the polycentric governance system are responsible for it, and what the underlying reasons are. Against this background, this work aims to open the “black box” of coordination between the water and agricultural sector, uncovering reasons and underlying incentive mechanisms that explain behaviour of actors.

Increasing water supply through desalination

A further measure to reduce consumption of freshwater in Spain has been the implementation of desalination plants, albeit being of much less empirical importance than irrigation efficiency measures. The first desalination plant in Spain was built in 1964 in Lanzarote. In 2004, the Spanish Government launched the so-called AGUA program that aimed at increasing water supply for urban needs, tourism, and agriculture through desalination of seawater and brackish water, the reuse of wastewater and irrigation efficiency measures. Desalination plants built under this program were financed by the EU, the national and regional governments, as well as private companies. Supporters see desalination plants as an opportunity to replace groundwater consumption, thereby reducing overexploitation of aquifers and contributing to the achievement of environmental objectives of the WFD. A further aim of desalination is to increase the level of guaranteed water supply in a context of climate change and reduced physical water availability (Cabrera, Estrela, and Lora 2019).

However, desalination has environmental impacts that cannot be neglected. These are, most importantly, the high energy consumption of the purification process, associated with high CO2 emissions; as well as environmental impacts on marine ecosystems by discharging brine back into the sea (García-Rubio and Guardiola 2017). Brine results from the process of desalinating seawater and consists of concentrated salt and chemical residues. Furthermore, critics see desalination as a continuation of the hydraulic paradigm. According to Morote et al. (2017: 8), “desalination established extraordinary new techno-social configurations, while preserving the same underlying logics of developmental, growth-oriented water governance”. Swyngedouw and Williams (2016: 55) argue that desalination has even become a “panacea for the country’s terrestrial water woes”.

Although several publicly financed desalination plants were built in the past decade, they remain largely underutilized mostly due to high price of desalinated water compared to surface water or groundwater. Reasons for these high prices are the already mentioned high energy use; reinforced by the fact that consumption of desalinated water is not subsidized in the same way as consumption of conventional water resources (Cabrera, Estrela, and Lora 2019). Consequently, desalinated water is only purchased by those water users who grow high value-added crops and who do not have access to other types of water resources. This also explains why – unlike irrigation efficiency measures described above – desalination is of empirical relevance only in a “specific spatial and temporal context”, representing 1.3% of the national water demand forecast for 2021 (del Moral, Martínez-Fernández, and Hernández-Mora 2017: 336). In relation to the River Basin Districts studied in this book, desalination is only used in the Mediterranean Basins. It is marginal in the Jucar, and non-existent in the Guadalquivir.

Due to the low demand for desalinated water, agricultural administrations in the Mediterranean Basins aim to promote the use of non-conventional water resources (Junta de Andalucía 2020a). Questions of coordination between the water and agricultural sector are thereby again of high importance, since it is ultimately about incentivizing water users to accept higher prices of desalinated water, and to give up consumption of overexploited water resources. This implies changing water rights from conventional resources to non-conventional resources. However, while in the academic literature, there are critical analyses of desalination in Spain (Saurí, Gorostiza, and Pavón 2018; Morote, Rico, and Moltó 2017), and of the reasons for low use of desalinated water (Villar-Navascués et al. 2020), issues of governance in general, and coordination in particular, have not been addressed.

These different approaches to reduce agricultural water consumption, i.e., increasing irrigation efficiency and promoting the use of non-conventional water resources for irrigation, need to be viewed in the broader context of climate change and food security. Indeed, achieving the WFD objectives is not an end in itself. In contrast, the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that climate change will increase needs for irrigation in Europe; while at the same time, physical water availability for agriculture as well as for other sectors will be at risk (IPCC 2022a). Even in temperate regions of Europe, local water shortages have become more frequent; and studies show that Spain will be confronted with a decline in runoff by 20% to 40% by the end of this century (Centro de Estudios Hidrográficos 2017a). According to the ICPP, heat and drought will therefore lead to substantive losses in agricultural production in most European areas over the 21st century – ultimately leading to increased risks of food security (IPCC 2022a). Since not only in Spain, but also worldwide, irrigated agriculture accounts for 60-70 % of water extraction (IPCC 2022b), the reduction of water demand in the agricultural sector can certainly be seen as a highly important lever to address water quantity problems.

1.3Aims and outline of the book

Several theoretical and empirical research gaps exist on how different forms of coordination in polycentric governance come about, relate to each other, and perform; as well as how private, public, and civil society actors in the three RBDs coordinate in the context of reducing agricultural water consumption. Against this background, the overarching aim of this study is to understand processes of cross-sectoral and cross-level coordination and their performance in the context of the WFD implementation in three Spanish RBDs. More specifically, the study aims to answer the following three research questions:

a)How do public, private, and civil society actors interact in the development and implementation of policies concerning the reduction of agricultural water consumption?

b)What are the determinants of these different patterns of interaction?

c)What are the determinants of process, output, and outcome performance of the three case studies?

To answer these questions, this study employs a comparative case study design (George and Bennett 2005; Gerring 2006), combining a cross-case analysis of three Spanish RBDs with a within-case analysis of decision-making processes in the RBDs (E. Ostrom 2005). Cases are selected by combining John Stuart Mill’s method of agreement and method of difference (Gerring 2006). Data to answer the research questions is collected in stakeholder interviews and based on policy documents and grey literature; and is analysed through Process Tracing (Collier 2011) and Qualitative Content Analysis (Mayring 2000).

A theoretical framework is developed to structure the empirical analysis and answer the research questions. The theoretical framework builds on the polycentric governance framework by Thiel et al. (2019), as well as on different conceptualizations of coordination in the public sector (Thiel et al. unpublished manuscript; Thompson et al. 1991; Bouckaert, Peters, and Verhoest 2010; Peters 2018). Furthermore, Action Situations and the rule typology of Ostrom’s (2005) IAD Framework are used to analyse coordination processes of actors.

The theoretical framework and research design is applied to the Guadalquivir, Jucar, and the Mediterranean Basins. Since these three RBDs are all situated in Spain, the broader socio-economic and institutional context in which cases are embedded is held constant, thereby facilitating the uncovering of causalities. Within Spain, I select cases that vary on an independent as well as on a dependent variable; with the overall aim to identify various causal pathways that may lead to an outcome (Gerring and Cojocaru 2016; Gerring 2006). More specifically, the three cases have different governance structures, with the Guadalquivir and the Jucar being so-called inter-regional RBDs, governed by the national level; and the Mediterranean Basins as intra-regional RBD governed by the regional government of Andalusia. Furthermore, the cases show different rates of environmental performance: while in the Guadalquivir, agricultural water consumption has increased in the last decade despite huge investments in irrigation efficiency measures (CHG 2013; 2020a), a slight decrease of agricultural water consumption is reported for the Jucar (CHJ 2014a; 2019a) and the Mediterranean Basins (Junta de Andalucía 2014a; 2019a). These slight reductions are nonetheless not sufficient to achieve the environmental objectives of the WFD and water resources continue to be overexploited also in the latter two cases.

Through this study, I uncover coordination processes in the three RBDs, thereby helping to understand why environmental objectives of the WFD remain largely unachieved. The study reveals a variety of different forms of coordination across sectors and levels, thereby contradicting widespread criticism on lacks of coordination. I argue that important reasons for not achieving WFD objectives are incentive structures which were not aligned with the overall policy objective of reducing agricultural water consumption. These incentive structures were deliberately created by different actors of the polycentric governance system at the EU, national and regional level. As a consequence, neither river basin authorities nor agricultural administrations had incentives to legally enforce a reduction of agricultural water consumption; nor did most of the farmers have incentives to reduce their consumption.

Theoretically, the aim of this study is to contribute to literature on coordination in polycentric governance and public administration. In this context, this research aims to deepen the understanding of hybrid forms of coordination, i.e., how different types of coordination co-exist and overlap. Furthermore, this book seeks to provide a differentiated and contextualized understanding of the different mechanisms which explain coordination of actors and their performance. Thereby, the study aims to support the building of middle range theories in polycentric water governance.3

1.4Structure of the book

In the next chapter, I present the conceptual framework. I first introduce main theories on coordination that are used for this study, namely public administration literature on coordination (e.g., Peters 2013; Bouckaert, Peters, and Verhoest 2010), as well as institutional analysis literature on polycentric governance (Thiel, Blomquist, and Garrick 2019) and the IAD Framework (E. Ostrom 2005; McGinnis 2011). Based on these literature strands, I develop the theoretical framework which aims at conceptualizing different types of coordination and their determinants, as well as performance of polycentric governance.

Chapter 3 introduces the methodology and research design of the study. The overarching aim of this research design is to enable the uncovering of causalities, i.e., to understand how and why governance processes performed the way they did. Furthermore, this chapter presents the research process, including the selection of case studies which is guided by the theoretical framework; data collection, consisting mainly of stakeholder interviews and grey literature; data analysis by using Process Tracing (Collier 2011; Blatter and Haverland 2014) and Qualitative Content Analysis (Mayring 2000); and lastly, the assessment of variables.

Chapter 4, 5 and 6 are devoted to the empirical analyses of the three case studies, namely the Guadalquivir, Jucar and the Mediterranean Basins. For each case study, I analyse the implementation of the WFD, focusing on the coordination between the water and the agricultural sector in the context of reducing agricultural water consumption. Each chapter follows the similar structure where I first analyse independent variables that are specific to the respective case study, such as contextual conditions and characteristics of heterogeneous actors. Then, I analyse different Action Situations by assessing independent variables that are specific to the respective Action Situation, discussing patterns of interaction that emerged in the Action Situations, and lastly, investigating their performance. Each chapter concludes by evaluating performance across Action Situations, i.e., of the overarching governance process.

In Chapter 7, I answer the three research questions of this study, explaining and comparing patterns of interaction in the processes under investigation, their determinants as well as performance of polycentric governance. I thereby build on the theoretical framework and connect and compare empirics of the three case studies. I then summarize main empirical and theoretical findings. The chapter concludes by discussing strengths and limitations of this study, and outlining avenues for further research on determinants, pathways, and performance of polycentric water governance.

1 Throughout the book, I use the term River Basin District to refer to the administrative boundaries of the WFD implementation, and thus to all three case studies. The Mediterranean Basins and the Jucar both consist of several river basins, which is why the terms River Basin Districts and river basins are not interchangeable in this work.

2 The highest percentage of surface water bodies in Spain is affected by point source pollution from urban wastewater (37% of surface water bodies), diffuse pollution by agriculture (34%) and water abstraction for agriculture (22%). The highest percentage of groundwater bodies is affected by diffuse agricultural pollution (56%) and water abstraction for agriculture (32%) (European Commission 2019b: 401).

3This study was embedded in, and funded by the research project STEER (Erhöhung der STEuerungskompetenz zur Erreichung der Ziele eines integrierten Wassermanagements, Increasing Good Governance for Achieving the Objectives of Integrated Water Resources Management), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF) from 06/2017 to 09/2020.

2.Conceptual Framework

In this chapter, I present the theoretical framework of this study on coordination in polycentric governance, its determinants and performance. I thereby build on the polycentricity framework by Thiel et al. (2019), and draw on further literature of the Bloomington School of Political Economy. More specifically, the aim of the framework is to conceptualize different forms of coordination – cooperation, competition, hierarchy and hybrids; as well as information exchange, conflicts and gaps in interaction – of diverse decision-making centres at multiple scale; to understand in what ways the environmental context, constitutional rules, characteristics of social problems, and characteristics of heterogenous actors shape the coordination of these decision-making centres; as well as how these decision-making centres ultimately perform in terms of providing public goods. Furthermore, to study the different coordination processes, the conceptual framework integrates Action Situations as analytical tool, as well as the 7-rules typology, both derived from Ostrom’s (2005) Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework.

The chapter proceeds as follows. First, I introduce classical political science and public administration literature on coordination, followed by a brief overview on institutional analysis literature on coordination, as well as outlining research gaps in these fields of study (Section 2.1). This is followed by developing the conceptual framework, organized along structure, processes and performance of polycentric governance (Section 2.2).

2.1Introducing key theoretical concepts

This study combines two related theoretical strands of literature, namely public administration literature on coordination of public actors (Peters 2013; Peters 2018) with institutional analysis literature on polycentric governance (Thiel, Blomquist, and Garrick 2019; V. Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren 1961) and the IAD Framework (E. Ostrom 2005; McGinnis 2011). In this section, I give a brief overview of these two academic fields; while only in the subsequent section (Section 2.2), I will elaborate on how I apply discussed concepts and approaches in my study.

2.1.1Public administration literature and coordination

The question of how actors in the public sector coordinate is probably among the oldest debates in public administration and political science (Peters 2015). Already several decades ago, Pressman and Wildavsky stated that also among practitioners “no suggestion for reform is more common than ‘what we need is more coordination’” (1973: 133) – an observation which probably still holds true today. The literature on coordination is therefore vast, but highly fragmented in terms of the used terms and concepts (Trein et al. 2021). Related concepts, which all centre around the idea that actors from different sectors or jurisdictional level need to work together, are, inter alia, collaborative governance (Emerson, Nabatchi, and Balogh 2012), collaborative management (Koontz and Thomas 2006), policy integration (Jordan and Lenschow 2010) or interplay management (Oberthür 2009).

Two perspectives on coordination are found in the literature, namely coordination as process and coordination as outcome (Greenwood 2016). Coordination as process is usually understood as interaction of actors from different policy sectors or jurisdictional levels. This interaction can range from exchanging information to resolving conflicts and concerns any stage of the policy cycle, from agenda setting to policy evaluation. More precisely, Malone and Crowston (1990: n.pag.) define coordination as “the act of managing interdependencies between activities performed to achieve a goal”. Reasons on the need for cross-sectoral and cross-level coordination are, on the one hand, increasing fragmentation of the public sector due to specialization of public actors or the creation of independent agencies; and on the other, the complexity of problems such as climate change, biodiversity or sustainable development which cut across administrative boundaries and requires actors from different sectors and levels to work together (Peters 2018). Indeed, these problems cannot be solved by an individual actor.

The idea of coordination from a process perspective is thus closely interconnected with aspirations to improve policy outcomes, and also in public debates, the claim to “strengthen coordination” is frequently put forward when desired policy outcomes are not achieved. This concerns also the Spanish water governance system, where actors from local, regional and national levels interact to govern water uses from different sectors; and in relation to which many scholars argue that cross-sectoral and cross-level coordination need to be strengthened (López-Gunn 2009; De Stefano and Hernandez-Mora 2018). The underlying normative assumptions are thereby inter alia that activities can be undertaken either more efficiently through coordination and the compatibility of tasks can be enhanced (Frances et al. 1991), or that aggregated welfare can be increased (Scharpf 1994). Furthermore, it is assumed that coordination strengthens coherence of different policies (cf. Dombrowsky et al. 2022), and reduces “redundancy, lacunae and contradictions within and between policies, implementation or management” (Bouckaert, Peters, and Verhoest 2010: 16). Expectations of what coordination can achieve are thus high.

Nevertheless, and despite the fact that coordination in the public sector is a widely studied phenomenon, there is little empirical knowledge on causal mechanisms and the impact of policy coordination (Trein et al. 2021). One of the reasons may be the fuzziness of the concept. According to Pressman and Wildavsky (1973), the term coordination is a tautology and therefore misleading since it remains unclear what actors should do. According to them, coordination can mean anything from exercising power – in the sense of vertical coordination within a federal system where central actors steers activities of lower-level actors – to finding consent.

Thus, in order to get a more nuanced understanding of the process of coordination, institutionalist approaches and governance literature usually distinguish between three main mechanisms or modes of coordination, namely market, hierarchy and networks (Bouckaert, Peters, and Verhoest 2010; Frances et al. 1991). According to Frances et al. (1991: 17), “any actual social analysis of coordination” will be based on these three models, either by combining or comparing them. Hierarchical coordination usually works through authority and power and relies on a central decision-making centre. Markets, in contrast, rely on competition and mutual adjustment of actors. In networks, coordination is “ruled by the acknowledgement of mutual interdependencies, trust and the responsibilities of each actor” (Bouckaert, Peters, and Verhoest 2010: 36). These three forms of coordination are usually understood as ideal forms, whereas empirically, hybrids which are combinations of the different modes of coordination usually emerge. I will elaborate below how these different forms of coordination are used in this study (see Section 2.2.2).

The second perspective on coordination is an outcome-based approach, where the idea is that elements of a system are “brought into alignment” or into “ordered patterns” (Thompson 2003: 37). A seminal definition of coordination as outcome goes back to Lindblom, who states that a “set of decisions is coordinated if adjustments have been made in it such that the adverse consequences of any one decision for other decisions in the set are to a degree and in some frequency avoided, reduced, counterbalanced, or outweighed” (Lindblom 1965: 154). The wording “to a degree and in some frequency” is important in this context indicating that the complete avoidance of contradictions, i.e., completely coordinated outcomes, may firstly neither be possible nor desirable due to the complexity and diversity of goals that exist in society, and the “inevitably contested nature of policy goals” (Greenwood 2016: 30). However, it seems that these inherent limitations to coordinated outcomes are seldomly considered in empirical studies on coordination.

Thus, while the need to understand coordination in the context of integrated natural resource management in particular, and in policy-making in general, is evident, the more classical literature on coordination of political science and public administration has its limitations. To get a more nuanced understanding of coordination, their drivers and effects, institutional analysis literature and in particular polycentric governance – which by definition is about interaction of interdependent decision-making centres – seems to be suitable. In the following, I therefore give a short overview on polycentric governance literature.

2.1.2Institutional analysis and coordination

The analysis of institutions aims at understanding the various ways in which formal and informal rules structure the behaviour of actors. While many different social science approaches exist to study institutions, such as the historical or sociological institutionalism, this study builds on institutional economics and approaches derived from the Bloomington School of Political Economy (see Baldwin, Chen, and Cole 2019).

Polycentric governance

The idea of polycentricity, as it is understood here, was introduced by Michael Polanyi and further developed by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom. The initial conceptual development goes back to the 1960s, a time when metropolitan governance was criticized by academics and the public as an “organized chaos” and as a “pathological phenomenon” due to the overlap of many different jurisdiction within one region (V. Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren 1961). In contrast to this widespread opinion, V. Ostrom, Tiebout and Warren (OTW) (1961) argued that the fact that multiple decision-making authorities at different scales overlap and co-exist next to each other can also be productive. Reasons are that the provision and production of public goods and services can be organized at different scales and levels, and by different actors. However, also in their later work, the Ostroms did not assume that polycentric systems are necessarily more efficient; in contrast, they stressed that the performance of any governance system remains an empirical question (V. Ostrom 1999; E. Ostrom 2010a). Yet, over the decades, and through an impressive number of empirical studies of polycentric governance, they demonstrated that “complexity is not the same as chaos” (E. Ostrom 2010a: 644). Elinor Ostrom thereby referred to initial criticism on polycentricity, i.e., the one-sided view of limited efficiency of polycentric governance.

The seminal definition of polycentricity of OTW, which is the basis for much of the related literature and is also applied in this work, reads as follows:

“Polycentric connotes many centers of decision-making which are formally independent of each other [...] To the extent that they take each other into account in competitive relationships, enter into various contractual and cooperative undertakings or have recourse to central mechanisms to resolve conflicts. [...T]he various political jurisdictions in a [functionally interlinked...] area may function in a coherent manner with consistent and predictable patterns of interacting behaviour. To the extent that this is so, they may be said to function as a ‘system’.” (V. Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren 1961: 831)

Three components of this definition are thereby particularly relevant for this work, namely structure, processes and outcomes of polycentricity. First, constituents of polycentric governance include the whole array of public sector organizations, of natural resource user groups, firms, or civil society organizations. Despite the notion of “centres of decision-making”, this does not mean that to be part of a polycentric governance system, actors necessarily need to be able to enforce decision-making or compliance (McGinnis 2016). Further, actors have autonomous, but limited rights, meaning that they can be held accountable and that there is no actor with an “ultimate monopoly over the legitimate use of force in a polycentric political system” (V. Ostrom 1999: 55). The basic unit of analysis in polycentricity usually are individuals, but may also be organizations (V. Ostrom 1999), which is the focus of my work. The structure of polycentric governance in which these actors are embedded furthermore consists of a “complex system of powers, incentives, rules, values, and individual attitudes” (Aligica and Tarko 2012: 247). Institutions thereby play an important role, defined as “the rules of the game in a society [...], the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction” (North 1990: 3). They may be formal, such as constitutions, laws, or property rights, or informal, such as sanctions, traditions, or codes of conduct. The second major component of polycentric governance relates to its procedural dimension, i.e., the mutual adjustment of actors. OTW (1961: 831) identified cooperation, competition, and conflict and conflict resolution as three main patterns, through which actors “take each other into account” and adjust their behaviour correspondingly. Third, the outcome of interaction and mutual adjustment of decision-making centres can be regularized patterns of overarching social order (McGinnis 2016). This emergent order should not be seen as something stable or in an equilibrium, but it is rather constantly reformed and reshaped by the constituents of polycentric governance (Aligica and Tarko 2012).

Research interest on polycentric governance has been steadily growing ever since and can be distinguished very broadly into two main approaches. The first approach relates to normative polycentricity theory, where authors describe from a normative perspective what should be in place for the emergence of polycentric governance, as well as the advantages of polycentricity (cf. Thiel 2017). Pahl-Wostl and Knieper (2014), for example, distinguish between four ideal-typical governance configurations, namely polycentric, fragmented, centralized coordinated, and centralized rent-seeking governance systems, depending on their degree of coordination as well as centralization. According to the authors, polycentric systems are coordinated and power is decentralized (Pahl-Wostl and Knieper 2014). Moreover, it is argued that polycentricity is conducive for adaptive capacity (da Silveira and Richards 2013; Pahl-Wostl and Knieper 2014; Carlisle and Gruby 2017), for providing a better institutional fit (Carlisle and Gruby 2017) or for improving coordination (Kellner, Oberlack, and Gerber 2019), and supporting sustainable use of resources (Pahl-Wostl 2015).

The second broad strand of literature can be subsumed under positive polycentricity theory, where normative claims are empirically tested (cf. Thiel 2017). In contrast to the normative approach, authors argue that polycentricity is an ever-present empirical phenomenon with all policy system, “even the most hierarchical” ones, being polycentric in nature (Berardo and Lubell 2019: 7). This means that it is not possible to differentiate between polycentric governance systems on the one side and centralized on the other. Polycentricity is rather seen as a framework or a “lens” (Blomquist and Schröder 2019; Thiel 2017) to study particular empirical processes, where multiple decision-making authorities at different jurisdictional scales and sectors interact. It is argued that conditions which improve the performance of polycentric governance are to be rigorously studied, thereby departing from normative claims (Berardo and Lubell 2019; Jordan, Huitema, Schoenefeld, et al. 2018). Correspondingly, authors in this literature strand have applied and tested different theories, such as the Ecology of Games (Berardo and Lubell 2019), institutional change (Thiel, Pacheco-Vega, and Baldwin 2019; McCord et al. 2017), or concepts of power (Tormos-Aponte and García-López 2018). This study is positioned in the second field of research, aiming to understand causal relationships between context and governance structure, the behaviour of actors and resulting performance.

Independent from these different research approaches, polycentric governance has been applied mostly to environmental governance, including water (McCord et al. 2017; Villamayor-Tomas 2018; Pahl-Wostl and Knieper 2014), climate (Jordan, Huitema, van Asselt, et al. 2018), or forest governance (Andersson and Ostrom 2008); but also to metropolitan governance (McGinnis 1999), or social movements (Tormos-Aponte and García-López 2018). The reason of the broad interest of environmental governance scholars may be that a polycentricity lens is particularly well suited to study environmental problems (McGinnis 2016; Heikkila, Villamayor-Tomas, and Garrick 2018). This is because resource systems usually cross administrative and political boundaries, and environmental problems also manifest at multiple levels and scales. Moreover, due to interdependencies of natural resources and their uses, there is no one optimal scale for the governance of the respective resource, but actors from different scales and levels need to interact. While the river basin, for example, is widely considered to be the appropriate level for the governance of water (Molle 2009), actors from other scales and levels also need to be involved to deal with the complexity of water resources usages. The strong focus of polycentricity literature on the topic of water is therefore not surprising.

Theoretical and empirical research on complex policy-making processes, where multiple state and non-state actors interact at different levels, from the local to the supranational, are not only studied under the umbrella of polycentricity. Indeed, multi-level-governance theories (Hooghe and Marks 2003), actor-centred institutionalism (Mayntz and Scharpf 1995; Scharpf 2000), intergovernmental relations (Agranoff 2001; Wright 1988), or co-governance (Tosun, Koos, and Shore 2016) analyse related questions.

However, despite this broad scholarly attention on polycentricity and related fields, important research gaps and challenges remain. These are gaps on the relationship between governance structure and processes (Lubell, Robins, and Wang 2014), as well as between different independent variables and the performance of polycentric governance. The latter includes inter alia remaining questions on how constitutional rules (Thiel 2017), interests of actors (Kellner, Oberlack, and Gerber 2019), as well as processes (Thiel 2017) relate to performance. The fact that there is no consensus on a common framework of polycentricity among scholars, as shown above, certainly is a challenge in consolidating findings concerning these questions. Further, studies often also lack precise definitions and operationalization of polycentric governance, which Heikkila et al. (2018) explain by the fact that many scholars approach polycentricity from a binary perspective.

A further research gap concerns empirical and theoretical questions on the processes of “mutual adjustment”, as introduced by OTW (1961). Indeed, although many authors build on the three authors, there is neither a consensus on definitions and measurement of different patterns of interaction, such as cooperation, competition, coercion or conflict; nor on the terms as such. Other concepts to approach “mutual adjustment” used in the literature are, for example, orchestration relying on inducement and incentives (Abbott 2017); adjustment through linkages (Pattberg et al. 2018); or self-organization, mutual adjustment, experimentation, trust-building and activation of overarching rules (Kellner, Oberlack, and Gerber 2019). Furthermore, comparative studies on the different forms of coordination in polycentric governance, as well as how these different types come about and perform, hardly exist. Not surprisingly, empirical studies on hybrid forms of interaction, as well as their theoretical underpinning on how to measure them, are even more rare.

The Institutional Analysis and Development Framework

A further key element of the Bloomington School is the IAD Framework, developed by Elinor Ostrom (2005). The framework focuses on the role of institutions in processes of collective action, where humans interact with each other and with the environment, thereby producing joint outcomes. The main unit of analysis are Action Situations, defined as “social space where participants with diverse preferences interact, exchange goods and services, solve problems, dominate one another, or fight” (E. Ostrom 2005: 14). The IAD Framework has been developed to study collective action problems of natural resource uses at the local level, and has been applied to case studies worldwide (Gibson, McKean, and Ostrom 2000; Cox, Arnold, and Villamayor-Tomas 2010). The use of this common framework allowed scholars to develop design principles to explain the success of managing common pool resources (E. Ostrom 1990; E. Ostrom 2005; Cox, Arnold, and Villamayor-Tomas 2010).

McGinnis (2011) further developed the IAD through the so-called Network of Adjacent Action Situations, in order to study complex policy settings, where decision-making processes at differen levels occur sequentially or simultaneously and interact with each other. Action Situations are thereby “adjacent to each other when outcomes generated in one action situation help determine the rules under which interactions occur within the other action situation” (McGinnis 2011: 52). The Network of Adjacent Action Situations has been applied to study nexus questions (Kimmich 2013), and influenced further frameworks such as the Combined IAD-Social-Ecological Systems (SES) Framework (Cole, Epstein, and McGinnis 2019).