Department Environmental Social Sciences

CrossWater - Transboundary Micropollution Regulation in Europe: the definition of appropriate management scales

 

One major challenge faced in environmental management is to adapt the spatial scale of regulation to specific environmental problems. From a natural science perspective, the appropriate scale of management units can be defined by the boundaries beyond which physical, chemical or biological processes have no effect on the environmental problem. However, actual political management units rarely match these ideal states. This is particularly true for transboundary water pollution in general, and micropollution regulation in particular, where different jurisdictions tend to produce diverse policy solutions and implement divergent instruments to tackle the very same problem within the same hydrological catchment area. In this research project we adopt an interdisciplinary approach combining mass flux analysis with political science and economic geography and ask the question: How can the potential mismatch between the physical extent of pollution and the respective political areas of action and regulation towards micropollution be visualized and grasped in order to design effective and efficient micropollution regulation?

Related PhD project by Florence Metz: How to explain instrument selection in complex policy processes

Project team

Prof. Dr. Karin Ingold Group leader, Cluster: PEGO Tel. +41 58 765 5676 Send Mail
Dr. Christian Stamm Deputy Director Tel. +41 58 765 5565 Send Mail
Ruth Scheidegger Tel. +41 58 765 5502 Send Mail

External team members

Christophe Sohn, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research

Laura Herzog, IPW Bern and Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research

Marc Schneider, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research

Antoine Paccoud, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research

Related Publications

Hering, J. G.; Ingold, K. M. (2012) Water resources management: what should be integrated?, Science, 336(6086), 1234-1235, doi:10.1126/science.1218230, Institutional Repository

Water management across borders, scales and sectors: recent developments and future challenges in water policy analysis

Integrated water resource management (IWRM) is widely accepted and has been implemented though international, national and regional water management guidelines. Nonetheless, concrete implementation of IWRM gives rise to new questions for policy analysis. Scholars interested in water regulation, the design of effective and efficient policy instruments, and structures of participative and multi-level policy processes face challenges regarding research design, concepts and empirical approaches. This special issue integrates research about regional, national and transboundary policy perspectives on water management in seven countries, four continents and two transnational water bodies. From the six articles presented in this special issue, we learn more about how to define integration, to think about borders and scales and to theoretically and empirically study collaborative management in water policy analysis.
Ingold, K.; Fischer, M.; de Boer, C.; Mollinga, P. P. (2016) Water management across borders, scales and sectors: recent developments and future challenges in water policy analysis, Environmental Policy and Governance, 26(4), 223-228, doi:10.1002/eet.1713, Institutional Repository

Sustainable wastewater management: is it possible to regulate micropollution in the future by learning from the Past? A policy analysis

This paper applies a policy analysis approach to the question of how to effectively regulate micropollution in a sustainable manner. Micropollution is a complex policy problem characterized by a huge number and diversity of chemical substances, as well as various entry paths into the aquatic environment. It challenges traditional water quality management by calling for new technologies in wastewater treatment and behavioral changes in industry, agriculture and civil society. In light of such challenges, the question arises as to how to regulate such a complex phenomenon to ensure water quality is maintained in the future? What can we learn from past experiences in water quality regulation? To answer these questions, policy analysis strongly focuses on the design and choice of policy instruments and the mix of such measures. In this paper, we review instruments commonly used in past water quality regulation. We evaluate their ability to respond to the characteristics of a more recent water quality problem, i.e., micropollution, in a sustainable way. This way, we develop a new framework that integrates both the problem dimension (i.e., causes and effects of a problem) as well as the sustainability dimension (e.g., long-term, cross-sectoral and multi-level) to assess which policy instruments are best suited to regulate micropollution. We thus conclude that sustainability criteria help to identify an appropriate instrument mix of end-of-pipe and source-directed measures to reduce aquatic micropollution.
Metz, F.; Ingold, K. (2014) Sustainable wastewater management: is it possible to regulate micropollution in the future by learning from the Past? A policy analysis, Sustainability, 6(4), 1992-2012, doi:10.3390/su6041992, Institutional Repository