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As China’s largest river basin, the Yangtze River Basin has the most mega reservoir groups worldwide. To protect the entire basin, the Central Government developed a system of joint operations of key reservoir groups in the Yangtze River Basin. This paper examines this joint operation system from a legal perspective and discusses its implementation as well as the challenges in practice. The following issues impede the effective implementation of the joint operation system: a lacking legal basis for the system, limitations related to the organizations that participate in the joint operations, limitations on the scope and objects of the joint operation system, and a lacking systematic structure for operation. This paper offers suggestions to improve the system.

The restoration and preservation of freshwater ecosystems is one of the prerequisites for a sustainable and fair future for all and therefore part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 6). However, countries worldwide are facing a challenge to achieve this ambition by 2030. This paper focuses on the legal and governance challenges faced in the European context with regard to achieving water quality ambitions, using experiences from the Netherlands as a case study. Although many EU Member States (MS) are facing a challenge to meet the ambitions set by the Water Framework Directive (WFD) in 2027, literature on effectiveness of governance approaches in terms of actual water quality improvement, seems to be scarce. Based on interviews, a survey, expert panel discussions and literature we show that in the Netherlands, an important problem is that stakeholders, also within organisations, have different views on ambitions, achievements and necessary follow-up actions. This is problematic because for realising the water quality ambitions, cross-sectoral cooperation (e.g. from agriculture and spatial development) as well as strengthened interlinkages between these related policy fields is crucial. Moreover, there is a tendency to stick to the status quo. In order to increase effectiveness, a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms for this lock-in will be necessary. This will enable the development of practical tools and instruments to support cross-sectoral and multi-level collaboration. The sectoral implementation of the WFD in the Netherlands was chosen by many other MS, resulting in similar cross-sectoral challenges as we found in the Netherlands. Insight into how other MS deal with lock-in situations is needed to develop pathways to achieving WFD ambitions.

The European Union (EU) and China have committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 and 2060, respectively. To explore the legal nature of these objectives and how the legal frameworks support their delivery, this article assesses the stringency of objectives and the adaptiveness of relevant legal frameworks. The former compares the objectives' bindingness, scope, prescriptiveness and precision of such obligations and compliance mechanisms. The latter compares the dynamism of mitigation policies and the legal institutions and processes that promote decarbonization. The article concludes that the climate neutrality objective is enshrined in the EU's climate law framework with a high degree of stringency overall. By contrast, China mainly incorporates the targets into administrative measures, the cadre responsibility and evaluation system, lacking formal rules and robust enforcement. By accelerating legal reform to integrate carbon neutrality into relevant regulatory instruments and addressing implementation problems, China explores its distinctive pathway to delivering on the objective.

Sinds jaar en dag tracht de omgevingswetgever een balans te vinden tussen flexibiliteit en bundeling bij de aanvraag van de omgevingsvergunning. Met de komst van de Omgevingswet komt de nadruk meer te liggen op flexibiliteit bij het aanvraagproces van de omgevingsvergunning. De aanvrager krijgt – mede door het loslaten van het concept van onlosmakelijke samenhang – meer vrijheid om het aanvraagproces van de vergunningen zelf vorm te geven. Er dient kritisch naar deze ontwikkeling te worden gekeken. Wordt de positie van de aanvrager van de omgevingsvergunning beter door het bieden van meer vrijheid bij de aanvraag van de vereiste omgevingsvergunning(en)? Deze vraag staat centraal in deze bijdrage.

Climate adaptation and water management, in particular flood risk management (FRM), in the Netherlands are strongly integrated policy domains. The observed and expected effects of climate change in the Netherlands will create a variety of pressures, particularly in relation to sea-level rise, increasing river discharges and changing precipitation patterns. Effective FRM is therefore stressed as a critical precondition for any future development and living in the Netherlands, both on the short and longer term. Partly influenced by the adoption of the European Floods Directive in 2007, the urgent need for climate adaptation is driving major developments in Dutch FRM, the most striking of which is the diversification and a partial shift in flood risk management strategies (FRMSs). This is best reflected in the adoption of the Dutch Delta Program as a basis for the development of long-term strategies for both flood and drought risk management, which inter alia initiated the development of the policy concept of ‘multi-layered safety’ and the adoption of a risk-based approach under the development of Dutch FRM. Whereas the focus in the Netherlands until recently was mainly and successfully on minimizing the probability of flooding (‘the fight against water’) and preparedness in case of a flood threat, in the course of time other strategies aimed at mitigating the effects of potential floods have gained a more prominent position (‘living with water’). As a result, FRM measures increasingly demand more space and more diverse actors became involved in Dutch FRM. This has increased complexity and fragmentation in the responsibilities for Dutch FRM, which resulted in an increasing need for communication, coordination and collaboration between different public and private actors in order to secure the effectiveness of FRM. These developments form the backdrop to this article, in which we analyse this broadened Dutch system of FRM and flood risk regulation. After having presented relevant facts and figures about flood risks in the Netherlands in Section 2, we describe the flood risk management strategies (FRMSs) stemming from the Floods Directive and the way in which these have been implemented in the Dutch FRM system in section 3. In Section 4, we discuss current observed developments and shifts in strategies, as well as relevant challenges these have brought about. In a synthesizing Section 5, the paper ends with a discussion of its findings. One of our key conclusions is that the development of innovative approaches in Dutch FRM is promising, but requires increased attention for challenges regarding coordination and cooperation, public participation and the availability of legal instruments to make spatial claims on privately owned land.

Conspicuous interdisciplinary effort has been spent on addressing the consequences of climate change in a forward-looking way. The concept of solution space is a recent contribution to help decision-makers identify feasible and effective adaptation solutions and to provide guidance on when they should be implemented and by whom. Although the current conceptualization of solution space already considers multiple disciplines, it remains dominated by biophysical ones and has not yet fully integrated legal and governance dimensions. This article first reflects on the current solution space framework through the lenses of law and governance and then proposes approaches to enrich legal and governance dimensions in the solution space concept. We argue that the legal and governance dimensions of the current concept of solution space can be improved by taking into account four aspects: 1) understanding the institutional and legal systems in a context-specific way; 2) embracing the dynamics and reflexivity of law and governance in the episteme of path dependency; 3) applying more diverse analytical methods (qualitative, qualitative/ quantitative, value-oriented) and/or assessments on a case-by-case basis; and 4) adding a normative perspective that includes the principles of legitimacy, transparency, accountability, equity, and distributive justice to measure the appropriateness of a certain adaptation strategy. The article concludes with suggestions for future research on how to implement the enriched solution space concept.

This study identifies how the governance of the transition to sustainable agriculture in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta is constrained by a lack of leadership, coordination, and funding. The Vietnamese Mekong Delta region is an important agricultural region yet highly vulnerable to climate change. In 2017, the Government of Vietnam issued Resolution 120, which calls for a transition towards sustainable development and climate change resilient agriculture in the delta. We evaluated the governance of implementing this resolution using an established transition governance framework, based on policy document analysis, ethnographic observations and interviews with national government agencies and ten departments in the delta provinces An Giang and Ben Tre. The analysis indicates that delays are caused by fragmented central government leadership and that friction exists between top-down plans and bottom-up action taken by the provinces in the delta. The transition is further constrained by the absence of inter-provincial coordination and funding mechanisms. Overall, this study shows that the required governance structure exists on paper but highlights how an insufficient governance process constrains climate change adaptation in Vietnam.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) bieden veel kansen om de waterveiligheid te verhogen en tegelijkertijd natuurwaarden te versterken. In dit artikel worden zowel een aantal ecologische en juridische aspecten besproken als de consequenties van NBS in voorlanden tussen dijk en water, ten behoeve van het overstromingsrisicobeheer.

Climate change is happening and it will have severe effects on human wellbeing and prosperity. These natural hazards will affect coastal, rural and urban areas. Besides effects on biodiversity and humans also property might be damaged or decrease in value. This requires disaster management, ranging from prevention to recovery. In order to manage the adverse effects, measures to increase resilience are necessary. These measures can be stimulated or done by the government, or by citizens themselves. This chapter focuses on the role of property rights in contributing to resilience. It discusses what property rights are—in common law and civil law systems, infringements of property rights, the remedies against these infringements and finally it reflects on the situation that natural hazards cause damage to property and different recovery mechanisms. The notion of property rights is placed in the wider context of justice.

The aim of the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) is to achieve a “good” chemical and ecological status for all waters by 2027. Currently, the Netherlands and other EU Member States are finalizing their plans for the third iteration of the WFD management cycle. In this paper, we conducted an ex ante evaluation of these plans by assessing the perceptions of regional water authorities on goal attainment and the factors that account for it. In order to gain these insights, we first reviewed literature and developed a framework of factors that stimulate or hamper the implementation of the WFD. More detailed insights into the relevance and characteristics of these factors were found by applying the framework in two in-depth case studies. A more generalizable pattern was found by translating the case study results into a survey among the regional water authorities. We found that the majority of the participating water authorities expect that 50% (or more) of their WFD objectives will be achieved in 2027. However, hampering factors such as a lack of political will or the impossibility to address key causes of the problems that were identified during earlier management cycles are still present. Since it is doubtful whether they can be addressed by regional water authorities, we conclude that it will be unlikely that ecological ambitions will be met by 2027.

Co-creation has emerged as a hot topic in contemporary planning pedagogies. Co-creation is seen as advancing the mutual exchange of knowledge between various actors in an educational setting. Despite the growing interest in co-creation in planning pedagogies, the potential types and flows of knowledge between learning communities are weakly conceptualised. This article proposes the community knowledge triangle as a fitting conceptual tool for understanding mutual knowledge exchange relations in co-creative settings. The triangle was utilised in a planning course to unpack the co-creative logic. The results showed that academics, practitioners and students exchanged knowledge in multiple directions, yet not in a reciprocal relationship.