**4. Discussion: Spatial rigidity and monotonic categorisation**

The implementation of the Water Framework Directive represents a decisive moment in the institutional history of water management in Europe, Portugal and the Douro. The WFD regime, including methodological improvements and more stringent targets, constitutes what can be called a 'metarregulation' with wide range impacts and lasting consequences. The higher level of concern for environmental impacts and the wasteful patterns of water use can be identified as positive steps in the direction of resolving lifelong problems. At face value, the detailed timetable of the new Directive seems to offer a robust mechanism for the assessment of ecological trends and the formulation of cost-effective solutions. However, the implementation of the Directive has served to consolidate an interpretation of problems that favours specific political and macroeconomic interests. The prevailing approaches systematically conceal that water reforms are an integral part of broader social transformations in the mechanisms of production and consumption of tradable goods and in the interpersonal relations. Likewise, mainstream procedures tend to ignore that the WFD regulation brings water management further into the sphere of money circulation and power political forces, which happens in important and contingent forms. Under a hegemonic approach informed by such technical and economic translation of problems, an array other important aspects of water management have received almost no attention, such as inter-catchment integration, the delegation of decision power and the balance of power behind the technological fix. WFD creates new opportunities to raise management issues (such as the increasing degradation of surface and ground water bodies) but there remains a tension between continuity and innovation that essentially reflect political clashes. The new Directive is implemented by invoking an apparent consensus about water issues, but under surface remains a series of intricate complexity of intersector and geographical inconsistencies. Making use of a universalising symbolism of 'common' challenges and 'shared' responsibilities, the implementation of the WFD never avoided being itself a locus of disputes and power affirmation.

It can be accepted that the WFD conveys improvements in many areas, such as a holistic approach to catchment issues, the consideration of cumulative impacts and the cyclical (adaptive) response to environmental degradation pressures. Even so, serious controversies persist in relation to the priorities of state action, which operates in favour of certain interests at the expense of broader, and more legitimate, social expectations. It should be remembered that the state includes a range of government bodies, regulatory agencies, parliaments and courts, a large entity that extends from the local to the global with fluid boundaries and exposed to the disputes between groups, classes and geographical areas (Jessop, 2008). The complexity of the state apparatus is even greater in the contemporary world, where a multiplicity of goals and liabilities frequently create significant confusion

Bringing Water Regulation into the 21st Century:

**5. Conclusions** 

The Implementation of the Water Framework Directive in the Iberian Peninsula 201

introduction of new semiotic basis for water management leads to the translation of local water issues into a technical vocabulary that is only shared by a small number of stakeholders (i.e. regulators, professional activities, engineers, and consultants). Because of this monotonic understanding of water problems, the direction of water management is decided upfront, with limited scope for innovation and creativity at the local level. It is true that the erosion of autochthonous wisdom did not start in the period of WFD implementation, on the contrary, it has been the outcome of larger processes of social and economic change, in particular the abandonment of traditional agriculture practices and depopulation. Nonetheless, the new Directive accelerates that process, given that the national states enjoy limited flexibility to decide about technical thresholds and regulatory instruments. Due to the spatial rigidity and monotonic assessments, there is a tendency to bypass the more time consuming steps of the new regulation (in particular, public participation and information sharing) and, unsurprisingly, opt for the aforementioned 'bureaucratic shortcut'. Overall, the shortcut tendency is itself an outcome of the very structure of the new regulation, which allows limited room for the detailed understanding

This brief examination of the local experience of water institutional reforms in the Douro demonstrates the persistent mismatch between regulatory objectives and the actual procedures and relations taking place in different parts of the river basin. The process of water regulatory reforms started in the 1990s, following macroeconomic and politicoinstitutional changes, and was translated into new legislation and increasing calls for an integrated management of catchments. However, it was really the opportunity created by WFD that provided the opportunity to introduce an new, more holistic regulatory rationality. Yet, underneath the new institutions, which include the introduction of water charges, public consultations, preparation of plans and scientific assessments, there is a constant reaffirmation of a centralised and selective basis of dealing with water management questions. Those problems have seriously limited the prospects of the new water institutional framework. Behind the hectic agenda of activities related to the introduction of WFD, it is possible to discover the persistence of old established practices that had marked the history of water management of the European Union in previous decades. Attempts to improve water management in the catchment under the WFD regime have often revived long-established cleavages and the inconsistencies of public policies related to the allocation, use and conservation of shared resources, which have typically

It was shown how a rationalistic approach to water problems has prevailed and pervaded most of the recent reforms. The narrow focus on engineering constructions has been replaced by more subtle attempts to manage water through economic incentives and impact mitigation, but without ever addressing the underpinning contradictions of water use and economic development. Although there is a shift from single processes to water regulation, there remains a clear line of continuity between the past and the present of water use and conservation in the Douro. If WFD helps to draw attention to water problems and mobilises private and public resources, at the same time it unravels silent

of local circumstances and the genuine engagement of stakeholders.

privileged certain groups of stakeholders and geographical areas.

among members of the general public. It is not clear to everybody that statehood is being qualitatively reformulated according to a wild interplay between homogenisation and particularisation, which unfolds towards higher levels of business competition, market liberalisation and economic growth (Brenner, 2004). The hegemonic reorganisation of the state according to neoliberal demands constitutes a multifaceted, non-linear and multiscalar process that tends to engulf all areas of social action and, crucially, to reshape socionatural relations according to the political and economic priorities of global markets (see Finlayson et al., 2005). The difficult challenges involved in that progression towards an Europe of interconnected localisms and pervasive market rationality is yet more acute in its semiperipheral countries, such as Portugal and Spain, which are expected to breach the development gap with northern regions whilst also cope with democracy deficits and growing environmental threats.

Our current assessment of the WFD experience builds upon a previous analysis that identified the overly ambitious goals of the Directive and the (often neglected) need to carefully consider the historico-geographical features of the Douro. The internal contradictions of the new regulatory landscape was then defined as a 'techno-bureaucratic shortcut', which means a tendency to produce superficial adjustments in practices and procedures whilst the overall trend of (bureaucratised and exclusionary) management remains largely unchanged (Ioris, 2008). Based on the points discussed above, it is now possible to further argue here that the 'techno-bureaucratic shortcut' has effectively two main ontological foundations, namely a spatial rigidity and the monotonic categorisation of water management issues. The first source of constraint – spatial rigidity – is related to the static understanding of how ecological and socionatural processes interact and evolve. The Directive has been territorialized (to the catchment scale) by ignoring the constant and perpetual remaking of the catchment's spatial configuration (i.e. the social and socionatural relations that produce space). The new regulation has progressed inflexibly across rigid geographical axes – above all, the nested spheres of governance of the European Union – with limited opportunity for deviating from a priori established management directions. Under the assumption that all Europe requires the same form of water management and regulation, the national state is powerfully inserted in a dialectics of inertia and modernisation that is predetermined by the transnational centres of political power. In that context, the regulatory principles of water management emanate concentrically from the top (the EU apparatus controlled by the stronger groups of interest) to the member states and from that to catchments and locations. The result of this rigid management of water is a pressure for the homogenisation of water management and regulation, which happens, first and foremost, through a narrow set of scientific methodologies typically developed in the northern European countries and reproduced with almost no modifications in Portugal (e.g. Bordalo et al., 2006).

Second, the interpretation of management problems and the formulation of possible solutions have followed the monotonic categories of the new European regulation, in particular the myriad of environmental economics tools that colonise the nucleus of WFD regulation, such as water charges, water markets, and the payment for ecosystem services. Under this quest for technical and operational efficiency local knowledge and the indigenous understanding of the hydrological system are being rapidly lost. The introduction of new semiotic basis for water management leads to the translation of local water issues into a technical vocabulary that is only shared by a small number of stakeholders (i.e. regulators, professional activities, engineers, and consultants). Because of this monotonic understanding of water problems, the direction of water management is decided upfront, with limited scope for innovation and creativity at the local level. It is true that the erosion of autochthonous wisdom did not start in the period of WFD implementation, on the contrary, it has been the outcome of larger processes of social and economic change, in particular the abandonment of traditional agriculture practices and depopulation. Nonetheless, the new Directive accelerates that process, given that the national states enjoy limited flexibility to decide about technical thresholds and regulatory instruments. Due to the spatial rigidity and monotonic assessments, there is a tendency to bypass the more time consuming steps of the new regulation (in particular, public participation and information sharing) and, unsurprisingly, opt for the aforementioned 'bureaucratic shortcut'. Overall, the shortcut tendency is itself an outcome of the very structure of the new regulation, which allows limited room for the detailed understanding of local circumstances and the genuine engagement of stakeholders.
