Integrated River Basin Management in the European Union: insights from Water Framework Directive and Flood Directive implementation

The European strategy to address the growing concerns regarding water resources protection and flood risk management is centred on the so-called Integrated River Basin Management (IRBM). The latter can be considered as an operational tool to enact the principles of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) that foresee an integrated management of land, water and related resources in order to maximise the economic and social welfare without compromising ecosystems’ sustainability (GWP TAC, 2000). IRBM, indeed, recognises the river basin as the space where an integrated and coordinated approach to the planning and management of natural resources should be conducted in order to make stakeholders aware of a wide array of social and environmental interconnections that occur at this hydrographical scale (Hooper 2006). The European Water Framework Directive (2000/60/CE, WFD hereafter), first, and then the Flood Directive (2007/60/CE, FD hereafter) recognise the river basin as the appropriate spatial scale to improve the quality of water resources and to enhance the capacity of flood risk management. Moreover, both directives promote the active involvement of civil society in the elaboration of river basin plans. In so doing, both directives represent an outstanding attempt to institutionalise the IRBM approach throughout European countries. Given the relevance of this topic at European level, this paper aims to provide a framework to understand how IRBM is conceived by European legislation and to discuss some of the relevant implications for national water governance systems derived from implementation of the requirement of river basin planning and management. To do so, the next section provides a description of WFD and FD, focusing on the instruments and processes established by the European Commission to promote IRBM. The third section sets out the theoretical framework at the basis of river basin management, making reference to the concept of “spatial fit”. The fourth section provides some empirical considerations on the implementation of river basin management in Europe, while the fifth section raise and discuss some concluding remarks.