Inputs zur gesellschaftlichen Entscheidungsfindung

Multiple actors across different institutional levels play a role in water governance. The coordination of these actors is important for effective water governance. However, the joining together of multiple actors can have several implications, such as a redistribution of power across actors, a change in democratic control and citizen influence as well as shifting accountability structures. These implications can involve different barriers and bridges that might impede or foster coordination. Through qualitative and quantitative methods, we assess the following barriers and bridges for coordination: (1) reputational power in terms of who is perceived as important for coordination in the water sector; (2) democratic legitimacy in terms of actors' value of local control of water services; and (3) accountability in terms of the regional actors' capacity to steer in the water sector. This article focuses on three cases in a Swiss region that has experienced water provision challenges due to its highly fragmented water supply structures. We find that reputational power serves as a bridge in our three cases: when the actors responsible for water supply regard potential coordination partners as important, then we observe coordination. In contrast, we do not find conclusive evidence to support the assumption that a fear of losing local control is a barrier for coordination. Instead, our results indicate that accountability, in the form of vertical steering by the regional actors, serves as a bridge for coordination, and that this could help mitigate some of the potentially negative effects of democratic legitimacy perceptions: through convening local actors or providing positive incentives to municipalities to work together, regional actors can foster coordination.

Most of the literature on serious games and gamification calls for a shift from evaluating practices to using theories to assess them. While the former is necessary to justify using game-based approaches, the latter enables understanding “why” game-based approaches are beneficial (or not). Based on earlier review papers and the papers in this special issue of Water entitled “Understanding game-based approaches for improving sustainable water governance: the potential of serious games to solve water problems”, we show that game-based approaches in a water governance context are relatively diverse. In particular, the expected aims, targeted audience, and spatial and temporal scales are factors that differentiate game-based approaches. These factors also strongly influence the design of game-based approaches and the research developed to assess them. We developed a framework to guide and reflect on the design and assessment of game-based approaches, and we suggest opportunities for future research. In particular, we highlight the lack of game-based approaches that can support “society-driven” sustainable water governance.

Switzerland plans to restore 4000 km of rivers by 2090. Despite the immense investment costs, river restoration benefits have not been valued in monetary terms, and a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) does not exist for any river restoration project in Switzerland. We apply stated preference methods to elicit public preferences and willingness to pay for restoring two specific but representative river sites. The benefits of restoration are compared with its costs. Upscaling the results to the national level shows that the government budget allocated for river restoration (CHF 1200/m) is insufficient to cover the costs of local restoration projects. However, the surveyed local populations are willing to pay substantially more for restoring rivers in their area of residence than they are legally obliged to do. The CBA results demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the costs in the two case studies, and hence that restoration efforts are justified from an economic point of view. A sensitivity analysis shows that the main results and conclusions do not change when we change some of the key assumptions underlying the CBA.

Environmental monitoring covers many different management domains. They range from biodiversity conservationto water protection, natural hazard prevention, impact assessment, resource use, or environmentalrestoration. The need for clear objectives has long been emphasized in the management literature, but has oftenreceived only little attention in monitoring design. This is partly due to the lack of systematic approaches forsetting objectives. In this paper, we present a formal approach based on Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis(MCDA), namely relevancy analysis, to prioritize management objectives. We demonstrate its use for a riverrestoration monitoring program in Switzerland comprising 35 physical and biological objectives. The relevancyof an objective is based on two main components, the general importance of the objective, and the problemspecificimpact range. The general importance of an objective is used to identify the most important managementobjectives from a hierarchy within the national program (i.e. objectives to be monitored). The impact range isused to understand which management objectives are more important to monitor for different river restorationmeasures (i.e. sub-selection of the objectives specifically for the restoration measure). The general importance ofa management objective was determined based on the frequency an objective is mentioned in selected policydocuments, and the legislative power and temporal persistency of each document. The impact ranges wereidentified from a questionnaire involving 15 Swiss river restoration professionals. Hereby, we assumed that theimpact range increases as the anticipated impact of the restoration measure on a specific management objectiveincreases, and as the uncertainty to anticipate this impact increases. For simplicity, we applied the approach onlyto one restoration measure, namely river widening. Six management objectives scored high in relevancy in termsof both impact range and general importance – channel structure and diversity, structure and diversity of thebanks and floodplains, sediment dynamics, longitudinal connectivity, lateral connectivity, and vertical connectivity.Hence, these objectives are both important national objectives for river monitoring (according to thelegislation) and are objectives that are potentially highly impacted by a river widening project. We performedsensitivity analyses related to the calculation of the general importance, the impact range, and the relevancy ofthe objectives. The practice-oriented approach can be transferred to a broad diversity of decision situationswhere there is a need for systematic evaluation of the importance of objectives. It could be a useful tool for sociallearning and finding group consensus about the priority of the objectives.

Transitioning economic sectors towards more sustainable futures is a major global challenge, in particular for non-OECD countries. Policymakers in these countries are confronted with a double challenge: how to implement cleaner technologies and infrastructures while at the same time promoting rapid industrial development. In catch-up studies, this trade-off has been increasingly interpreted as providing windows of opportunity for gaining strong leadership in new generations of cleantech industries. In this paper, we maintain that in order to specify how these windows of opportunity can be endogenized, a deeper understanding is needed about whether, how and by whom the directionality of innovation systems can be influenced. For this purpose, we propose an analytical approach that draws on the technological innovation system framework extending the current understanding of directionality in two ways: first, we complement the prevalent top-down perspective with a bottom-up view exemplified by the institutional entrepreneurship literature. Second, we posit that the focus has to be shifted from the manufacturing of single technologies to the transformation of entire socio-technical systems. The presented framework is validated by a case study on recent shifts in the dominant technology in China's urban water management sector. Major changes in the country's sectoral selection environment led membrane bioreactor technology to become the dominant design in urban water management - a development that is unmatched in any other country in the world. Owing to these transformations, China's technology firms outcompete multinational players and therefore they show strong potentials for industrial leapfrogging. However, although the promise to solve environmental problems played a decisive role in the shaping of the selection environment, it remains unclear whether the observed transformation leads the way to a more sustainable sector structure in the longer run. The case, however, still enables us to specify how windows of opportunity can be endogenized through the interplay of different actors trying to shape different layers of the selection environment in a specific sector.