The EU approach for Integrated Water Resource Management: Transposing the EU Water Framework Directive within a national context: key insights from experience

This chapter discusses the European Union (EU) approach to Integrated Water Resource Management. The EU Water Framework Directive is regarded as an example for a successful legal implementation of IWRM. It takes a river basin approach to enable water management across borders and an integrated approach to include consequences of environmental management, nature conservation management, agriculture and land use. Furthermore the Water Framework Directive puts more emphasis on sustainable and equitable use of water amongst others by the requirement of the recovery of costs for water services, including environmental and resource costs. Public participation is an important element, but at the same time national Member States decide how access to justice is organized. Newly developed regulatory approaches and legal instruments are complex and cause uncertainties on how to interpret them, resulting in large differences between Member States and they appear hard to enforce. In the last fifteen years this led to many discussions on the right interpretation of provisions, concepts and obligations that follow from the directive. The main advantage of the Water Framework Directive seems to be the focus on the protection of ecosystems instead of only regulating point source pollution and the flexibility and adaptability offered to the Member States. As agricultural pollution and water use are the most important threats within the EU, these need to be better addressed.