Dealing With Salinization in The Netherlands - A Good Governance Case?

Abstract

Climate change is putting pressure on freshwater systems across the globe due to increased prevalence of more intense droughts, more extreme weather events and a rising sea-level. As such, governance of water-related systems gets increasingly more attention from scientists. During recent years, the Dutch water system has been put under pressure even more by salinization and droughts. This is directly linked to climate change and freshwater supply. Future scenarios tell that this problem will become more problematic in the future. Recent research on salinization and governance has not yet addressed the two topics combined, which indicated that there is a knowledge gap. As such, this research aimed to provide insights in characteristics of good salinization governance, provide an evaluation of the current Dutch salinization governance, and deliver a set of recommendations for addressing bottlenecks within the current salinization governance system. To find out whether the governance system of salinization could be considered good, an analytical framework, based on a conceptual framework adopted from Bennett and Satterfield (2018), was constructed for the assessment of the effectiveness, the equitability, the responsiveness, and the robustness of the governance system. During the research various freshwater- and salinization-related policy documents have been analyzed. In addition, a series of in-depth interviews with key stakeholders from the governance system have been conducted. The data, with corresponding scores on various governance objectives and characteristics, gave insights on which objectives of governance are scoring poorly, and which are evaluated as good. The results showed that policy documents and stakeholder opinions did not align. Following from the results, this research concluded that the implementation of policy is being hold back and that effective and responsive action is not following timely. Most of the participants did especially have critique on the direction, capacity, efficiency, and fairness of the system. As such, there is a need for better implementation of the policy to improve the performance of the system The context- rich stakeholder interviews indicated that there are bottlenecks within the science-policy interface, politicization of freshwater governance and that there is a too flexible approach to freshwater management. This research provided a recommendation for each of these bottlenecks, in order to improve the governance system in the future. Due to some limitations of the research, future research on each of the bottlenecks could provide valuable insights on how to improve the governance system for more effective and timely action.