Environmental Participation by Catharina Landström

Author:Catharina Landström
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030330439
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Catchment Partnerships—Continuing Environmental Participation

Catchment Partnerships are comprised by the heterogeneous population of stakeholders affected by surface water and interested in its management; they explicitly involve local communities, in addition to institutions and businesses. Catchment Partnerships were created as a key feature of the CaBA first introduced in a Defra (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs) policy paper in 2013. The driver for this policy was the recognition by the UK Government that water decision making and action needed better local connection. This system was seen as being very top-down in a way understood to create barriers to the implementation of many measures that would promote better water quality, something required by the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) adopted into UK legislation. In addition to failing the WFD water quality criteria the UK also had problems with getting local communities engaged with water management and policy. Making the catchment the primary unit in water management forced new collaborations since catchments do not coincide with existing political and administrative units. It also brought local decision making to the forefront in ways that made water management and governance relevant to local people. The 2013 policy paper was underpinned by a pilot project initiated in 2011 and it was the success of this that encouraged the nationwide implementation of the policy.

The 2013 policy paper has six sections explaining the objective of the CaBA, how it would work in reality, the relationship to other Defra delivery schemes, what Defra would do to support the local adoption of CaBA and how the transitional arrangements would look. Key to this document is the definition of a catchment as ‘[A] geographic area defined naturally by surface water hydrology. Catchments can exist at many scales but within this framework, we have adopted the definition of Management Catchments that the Environment Agency uses for managing availability of water for abstraction as our starting point’ (Defra 2013: 3). As indicated in the quote CaBA introduced a new organisational unit, the Catchment Partnership. These were defined as: ‘a group that works with key stakeholders to agree and deliver the strategic priorities for the catchment and to support the Environment Agency in developing an appropriate River Basin Management Plan, required under the Water Framework Directive’ (Defra 2013: 3).

According to the policy document the Environment Agency (EA), the public agency leading on water issues in England, was tasked with the responsibility of implementing Catchment Partnerships in all river catchments in England. The partnerships themselves were explicitly underpinned by an idea of stakeholder co-management and from the outset civil society organisations were viewed as central. As Catchment Partnerships were set up, local environmental organisations—often in the guise of rivers trusts or wildlife trusts, non-profit, volunteer-based—took on the role of hosts. This positioned these, often quite small, local environmental stewardship groups in a new relationship with powerful actors in water management such as the water utility companies and the EA.

Working with several local rivers trusts in England we learned about how the CaBA strategy was experienced as it was rolled out.

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