Abstract
Sweden is a decentralised country where local managers, who are key actors in water management, often deal with relatively difficult prioritisations, tradeoffs and conflicting goals. Many of these challenges relate to the effective implementation of the European Union Water Framework Directive. As an input to these challenges, the present paper elicits and analyses local and semi-local citizens’ preferences for water quality attributes related to the European Water Framework directive in a river basin located in southeast of Sweden. Based on a choice experiment tailored to the case study area, the paper analyses preferences for selected attributes based on real criteria for ecological water status in the implementation of the directive. The target population lives in the municipalities through which the river passes, or in municipalities neighbouring those. Despite this spatial proximity to the river, the analysis reveals limited knowledge and interest in matters related to the environmental quality of the river. There is no evidence that preferences differ between respondents with regard to experience or knowledge about the water basin, nor with regard to recreational habits in the area. These results offer input to local water management by providing information about preferences for explicit water quality attributes.
Highlights
The European Union Water Framework Directive emphasises public participation and economic principles, and that management should be organized by the natural logic of water catchment areas, rather than by existing administrative borders (EC 2000/60)
The methodological approach to achieve the study’s aims is a choice experiment where hypothetical alternatives are based on modified versions of the actual criteria for different levels of water status used in the implementation of the directive in the area
This was despite a large proportion of them having been collected from an area that was limited geographically, but was in relative proximity to the river basin
Summary
The European Union Water Framework Directive emphasises public participation and economic principles, and that management should be organized by the natural logic of water catchment areas, rather than by existing administrative borders (EC 2000/60). The purpose of the study, is to elicit local and semi-local citizens’ preferences for water quality attributes explicitly related to the directive. The paper analyses how the local and semi-local population value important criteria for low, moderate, good and high ecological status in the case study area, namely the Alsterån River Basin in the southeast of Sweden. By this approach, the study focuses on preferences for characteristic directive attributes and explicitly highlights tradeoffs across them. We are able to assess both the economic values and the potential trade-offs between relevant water quality criteria
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