Abstract
Current European Union (EU) policies require policy-makers on different levels of government to engage with new forms of governance such as participatory planning, aiming to improve environmental policy delivery. We address the central issue of how policy-makers learn about the appropriateness of different modes of governance. By way of example, we examine recent innovations in EU water governance – primarily through the enactment of the Water Framework Directive (2000) and the Floods Directive (2007), and their requirements for stakeholder participation in the planning process. We discuss scope for policy-induced ‘governance learning’, wherein policy-makers draw on evidence and experience to learn about how to design and execute effective participatory planning and decision-making. In doing so, we aim to extend work on policy learning by focusing on the procedural dimensions of governance, and make a case for more coordinated and systematic approaches to gathering evidence and learning from ongoing EU environmental policy implementation.
Highlights
The multi-level and multi-arena European Union (EU) polity (Héritier, 2002) has posed considerable challenges for the implementation of EU policy in general (Milio, 2010), and environmental policy in particular (Knill & Liefferink, 2007)
This may be indicative to some extent of scope for learning in other policy fields in Europe and beyond, but in this paper we focus on the field of water governance as shaped by the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) and Floods Directive (FD)
In an effort to conceptually structure instrumental ‘governance learning’ we mapped types of learning on the basis of endogenous and exogenous sources of learning, and serial and parallel modes, and illustrated these with examples from the water governance field. This is a tentative mapping, as empirical research on the nature and extent of governance learning remains scarce, but it is our hope that this may prove useful to other researchers working on evidence-based, adaptive governance – especially in the area of participatory planning and collaborative decision-making
Summary
POLICY AND SOCIETY 289 effective environmental governance, the extent to which this has occurred remains unclear (Bäckstrand, Khan, Kronsell, & Lovbrand, 2010; Jordan, Wurzel, & Zito, 2003). We present a conceptual framework for understanding learning by policy-makers, which has emerged out of our work on the recent evolution of participatory and collaborative arrangements in EU water governance. The current state of European water policy, we argue, presents several opportunities for different modes of governance learning by policy-makers and authorities at multiple levels. This may be indicative to some extent of scope for learning in other policy fields in Europe and beyond, but in this paper we focus on the field of water governance as shaped by the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) and Floods Directive (FD).
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