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Introduction

The previous chapter highlighted the concept of mainstreaming and its emerging importance in EU adaptation policy. In this chapter, the implications of this agenda for a specific policy sector – water – are examined. In spite of its economic roots, the EU has in fact been confronting issues associated with the governance of water for over three decades. In fact, water quality constituted one of the very first priorities identified by EU environmental policy makers. In common with some of the other policy areas we have examined, the European Commission has been somewhat handicapped by the lack of a clear legal mandate to regulate. At first, this was partially resolved by framing water quality problems as threats to the common market and/or public health, which gave rise to a somewhat uneven pattern of intervention. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, the increased competence of the EU in environmental matters permitted a thorough overhaul of the water acquis, from which emerged a new approach, pursued through the Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC) and separate legislation on floods (Directive 2007/60/EC). At the time that the water acquis was rapidly developing, climate change was not a prominent concern at EU level. In fact it was only with the creation of the ECCP II in 2005 (see Chapter 7) that the implications of climate change began to be seriously explored by EU water experts.

Climate change is shaping up to be one of the defining issues of this century. Once a matter that only preoccupied a fairly select group of atmospheric scientists, in the past few years it has forcefully entered the political mainstream in many industrialised states, demanding a political and policy response at all levels of governance. Not only is climate change scientifically very complex but it also raises very challenging governance issues. This is because addressing climate change and its consequences requires governors to make policy interventions that will deeply affect production and consumption decisions right across the world. In this book we focus on the policy choices and their associated governance dilemmas that are constitutive of these interventions. By using the term ‘governance’ instead of government, we seek to draw attention to the changing context in which these policy choices have been (and will in the foreseeable future be) made. So, whereas in the past, governments made and implemented the key choices, today governing – at least in Europe – is undertaken among a wider array of actors, including those in the private sector.

In the first chapter, we argue that governing is a purposive activity, which involves making difficult choices between alternative options supported by different groups of actors who commonly subscribe to values that are partly and sometimes wholly incommensurate.

Introduction

In his 1978 book, Reconciling Man with the Environment, Eric Ashby sought to address what he considered to be one of the most critical issues of his time: the protection of the environment. He believed that by continually making difficult policy choices and confronting the associated dilemmas, humans would gradually arrive at a fuller understanding of their environment and thus a more anticipatory approach to managing it. This reconciliation, he contended, would be achieved not by ‘heroic long-term megadecisions’ but by ‘the cumulative effect of wise medium-term microdecisions, each … clarifying the shape of the decision that needs to follow’ (Ashby 1978: 87).

Ashby was one of those rare individuals in public life who somehow managed to combine a lifelong career as a scientist (he was, among other things, President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the Royal Society), with equally important roles in policy making. This sensitised him to the realpolitik of decision making.