LIST OF PANELS

Water governance inherently faces many social and ecological complexities. Water provides a large diversity of ecosystem services (water for irrigation, cooling, drinking, support for biodiversity, hydropower, etc.) that are often in conflict with each other. Consequently, water is an essential resource in other sectors such as health, energy, or agriculture. With increasing pressure of climate change and biodiversity loss, not only the protection of water resources and water-related ecosystems becomes increasingly critical, but also the protection from water gains importance, for example through flood protection measures. Such measures can have consequences again for drinking water provision, agricultural land use, or the state of ecosystems, in turn affecting a wide diversity of interests and stakeholders. Thus, water governance is complex spanning multiple sectorial, territorial, social and political boundaries.
Due to its substantive importance for life and its emblematic manifestation of important governance challenges with relevance also to other fields, water has always been a key policy sector for studies of the policy process, public administration, and environmental governance. Research on the governance and management of water resources has thus traditionally contributed to new developments in these broader fields. Examples for this emblematic potential of water policy and governance include several landmark studies in policy theories such as the Advocacy Coalitions Framework or the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework. More recently, for example, network approaches have been advanced in this field providing new insights in the governance of complex systems beyond the water realm. The objective of this panel is to continue this tradition and to understand and discuss the current complexity of water governance, and to provide ways of analyzing it, in the context of broader theories, approaches and methods of governance and the policy process.
More specifically, this panel deals with the general question of how water policy and governance deals with complex interactions among the different levels of governance (from the international to the local), different stakeholders (from public administrations to research to private industry), or different sectors (from agriculture and land use to biodiversity and energy, and so forth), and others. Our focus includes both, structural aspects of the design, adaptation and innovation of institutions and governance structures, as well as procedural aspects of how actor interactions unfold and play out in dealing with these multi-faceted complexities. Potential aspects to be explored include:
i) the exploration and analysis of important trade-offs between different sources of complexity and their consequences for governance systems;
ii) the choice of policy tools and approaches (or the absence of adaptive action) in the face of increasing problem pressure and complexity;
iii) the establishment of nascent, boundary-spanning policy problems and the responses of actors and policy systems;
iv) the multi-scalar challenges of water spanning multiple environmental and political boundaries;
v) water as a key policy sectors connecting other sectors, demanding new coalitions and new forms of collective action.

Currently, water management and governance are facing severe challenges due to climatic change, biodiversity loss, urbanization, or population growth. These issues all related to the multi-sectoral, multi-level and multi-actor complexity of water management and governance. Our panel therefore focuses on issues of dispersion of authority in a multi-level, multi-stakeholder and multi-sector context, as well as questions of design, adaptation and innovation of institutions at different scales in order to deal with these challenges.
Papers submitted to this panel should deal with complex interactions among the different levels of governance (from the international to the local), different stakeholders (from public administrations to research to private industry), or different sectors (from agriculture and land use to biodiversity and energy, and so forth), and other complex interactions. Papers should aim at describing and understanding the interactions among (some of) these different dimensions, or they should deal with the design, adaptation and innovation of institutions capable of dealing with this multi-scalar complexity.
In terms of substantive issues, relevant papers could deal, among many others, i) reforms in urban water infrastructure, related trends of digitalization and needs for information sharing among levels and actors, or decentralization of infrastructure and services, and interactions with other services such as energy, communication, etc.; ii) emerging issues in water quality protection, micro-pollutants, pesticides and drinking water issues across borders and sectors, and related policies and policy mixes; iii) reform and implementation of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) as an (evolving) institution dealing with holistic water management and governance, related challenges of harmonization and local specification of WFD policies, institutional adaptations and cross-border governance issues; iv) the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically SDG 6 (water), as well as interactions of SDG 6 with other SDGs in other sectors, in both the global North and South, but also across countries and world regions; v) challenges related to climate change, flooding, biodiversity loss, urbanization, and related mitigation and adaptation policies and institutional innovations.
The panel aims to provide a platform to discuss new and innovative conceptual approaches and methods to understand the design and implementation of integrated modes of water governance. We thus specifically invite contributions relying on interdisciplinary approaches, new and innovative concepts, methods and empirical research, and contributions opening up the research agenda for the future.