Search

England and Wales have a long-established abstraction licensing regime for determining water allocations amongst economic sectors, particularly agriculture. This regime is implemented by the Environment Agency (EA) and Natural Resources Wales (NRW), primarily through Catchment Abstraction Management Strategies (CAMS) and attendant Abstraction Licensing Strategies (ALS), to support policy requirements for environmental sustainability. Over time, water licensing has been increasingly linked to water availability in catchments while licence trading now provides greater flexibility in allocations. Ongoing reforms will further seek to integrate resource sustainability and the catchment based approach (CaBA) to management into this evolving regime. Yet a critical question concerns whether such policy commitments to countering ‘unsustainable abstraction’ have been achieved, particularly by the agricultural sector. Here, we define sustainability in terms of the environmental, social and economic outcomes of governance.

Rural Crafts are crafts with agrarian roots, but they are not easily located historically, or within today’s developed markets. This study stresses Rural over Heritage Crafts (based in manual skills and traditional materials, designs and techniques), although the two are not mutually exclusive. Rural Crafts are considered, present and past, through interviews with practitioners based in South Wiltshire. The study embraces networks of crafters, interviews with individuals and a focus for a rural craft event located at the Harnham Water Meadows at Salisbury, a historic location. It is established that, while few participants sustained themselves financially through their craft, it was clear that participation is ‘value driven’, providing personal benefits. The ethos of sustainability is a strong theme, both in sourcing materials and in the processes employed, especially true for individuals working with wood and thatching. Few clear similarities are found from past cottage industries, although the sense of continuity in craft is still strong. Networks included craft associations, and opportunities for informal learning, but there is a lack of formal training opportunities. This finding may be historic, as most people interviewed were over 60 years. As well as an age bias, there is a strong gender bias with men dominating regular part-time or full-time paid occupations and women treating their craft more as a hobby. Most people treat sales of any products as a bonus, and the future of such activities is dependent more upon personal interests and networks than on formally trained (often younger) individuals, more so than formal training delivered through individual organizations or companies. Otherwise, our conclusions are in line with modern ideas of personal, well-being and social benefits derived from craft activities.

For south ‘Wessex’, despite complexity evident on the ground, there is little research that directly links river channel form with historic economic development; that is, channel genesis and planfo...

Stakeholder participation in environmental management has become widespread globally while the normative benefits of multi-stakeholder processes in governing natural resources are promoted by academics and policy makers. As projections indicate more frequent and intense flood events with future climate change, this article examines one stakeholder participation process within UK flood risk management to evaluate whether it contributes to enhancing effective engagement, through social learning. Evidence is derived from multiple interviews conducted within the England's Regional Flood and Coastal Committees (RFCCs), which were specifically introduced to better integrate local level interests in regional flood defence decision-making. In testing a modified ‘individual-community interaction’ learning framework, it is apparent that personal and group learning outcomes were evident to varying degrees, suggesting that stakeholder participation was relatively successful. However, our analysis suggests that flexibility exists within such structures, allowing reflexive reconstitution to further increase social learning. Recommendations for future stakeholder participation are proposed, providing lessons for both UK flood governance and similar flood risk management processes in other countries.

Being neither large, nor unusual in its natural attributes, environmental and historical interest in south London's River Wandle lies in the human impact on water quality, habitat modification, maintenance of discharge and physical channel form. Problems emerged during the first half of the nineteenth century deriving from sewage and industrial development, so that between about 1930 and 1970, with the authorities negligent, the river channels became functionally open foul sewers. Recovery since then has included efforts to improve water quality, restore the banks and associated habitats and create enabling initiatives within all economic sectors. This article describes the Wandle's significance as an arena for scrutinizing water resource conflicts since the 1950s, its contribution towards Integrated Water Resources Management and the rise of an urban nature conservation ethos. Questions remain around how — and to what condition — the river might be restored.

Participatory environmental governance is increasing worldwide. One area where such governance forms are apparent is in the management of water resources. For example, in the European Union the Water Framework Directive mandates several forms of involvement via its legal obligations. Under the Directive, implementing agencies should provide information on river basin management planning to the public, consult citizens and stakeholders during planning and actively involve interested parties in the plan process. Yet questions arise over the success of participatory processes on the ground in EU member states. In this study, participation was therefore evaluated in WFD river basin planning in England and Wales using process, community, output and outcome-related indicators. Research was conducted through extensive quantitative and qualitative data collection over a long temporal scale within case analyses of the Anglian, Humber and South West river basin districts. Results suggest that while the first phase of river basin management largely met legal requirements, the actual success of participatory water governance was mixed. On this basis, recommendations are made for enhancing participation in future river basin planning through national and EU policy.

Relatively little attention has been given to post-1800 changes in water meadow management. Before this, many ‘bedwork’ systems originally provided grazing within sheep-corn husbandry but this changed in the nineteenth century when water meadows provided grazing for dairy herds and grew hay crops. Using oral and published accounts, this paper explores changes in management from water meadows as heavily invested agricultural systems to ecological, hydrological and landscape service providers today.

Several attempts have been made to explain the formation of collaborative watershed partnerships—that is, multi-actor groups which work together to resolve environmental problems at a watershed scale. But to what extent do these explanations ‘travel’ from their original home – namely the USA – to other jurisdictions, where similar claims are being made about the rise of collaborative environmental governance? To that end, this article critically evaluates how well one leading theory, namely the political contracting framework (PCF), explains their emergence in the rather different institutional context of the United Kingdom. Drawing on a survey of collaborative watershed practices, it argues that they are functionally equivalent to partnerships. Furthermore, when suitably amended, the PCF explains many important aspects of their emergence. The same critical factors are associated with their development, but these should now be assessed across the entire ‘life-cycle’ of partnerships. The implications of these findings are identified and explored, the underlying aim being to inform a much more comparative theoretical approach to understanding what appear to be important changes in collaborative environmental governance practices.

The voluntary sector is value driven, issue focussed and considered economically efficient due to volunteer engagement and low administrative overheads in meeting conservation objectives. Independence and flexibility make it an intermediary between stakeholders and government and it is proving an effective vehicle for public engagement. NGOs are emerging as a key player in environmental action, making them a partial replacement for 'big government action' and may be heralding a 'Big Green Society'. The sector ranges in scale from small, local conservation charities to nationally important organisations. This article focuses on functionality because resource issues relate to funding, competences of personnel, continuity of mission and access to expertise, and all are affected during times of austerity. NGOs were largely task-oriented, yet they rapidly developed a campaigning role encapsulating an ever deeper role in both planning and policy formulation. Subsequently, they have developed community inclusion at the core of their function. While the portents remain good, potential problems relate to economic resources, task allocation, impacts on labour markets, interactions with the statutory sector, operational independence and to relations with local democracy. Outlined in this paper are historic functions, operation and development of the sector and perceived issues for the future.

Both nonstatutory community-based catchment management groups and existing statutory groups seek effective environmental management characterised by public participation, collaborative working and decentralised modes of assessment, planning and decision making. The characteristics and challenges of catchment management for water resources and protection of water quality require such approaches, and an expansion of both community-based and state-led initiatives has been evident in the United Kingdom. Available information about these developments is, however, limited and this paper reports survey findings of such initiatives, providing a mid-to-late 2009 ‘snapshot’ of the situation in England and Wales. Catchment management groups are profiled in terms of size, organisational structure, membership, financing, technology transfer, policy influence and other outcomes. The results are interpreted with reference to a growing international literature, the potential sustainability, effectiveness and impact of groups and environmental governance challenges, including those posed by the European Union Water Framework Directive.

Understanding the evolution of alluvial landscapes requires an appreciation of soils, geology, fluvial geomorphology and climate as well as ecology, history and archaeology. For bedwork water meadows systems, it is antecedent floodplain and channel morphologies that condition layout, yet these considerations are generally overlooked. This paper proposes a speculative developmental sequence for the Harnham water meadows at Salisbury from the late Pleistocene, including the construction of floated water meadows in the mid seventeenth century, on an established grazing marsh. It is argued that the 'island' formed at the split in the River Nadder at the confluence with the Avon (upon which the water meadows are situated) is a consequence of accelerated alluviation and channel pattern adjustment to the imposed sedimentary load. Sediment loading from arable agriculture was subsequently ameliorated by vegetation community establishment leading to stabilised river channel geometries that provide the basis...

Payments for Ecosystems Services (PES) schemes are an underdeveloped component of the policy mix for catchment management in many countries. The importance of intermediaries to such schemes is acknowledged in the literature but few studies go beyond theory to evaluate practice. This paper analyses generic intermediary functions for PES. It then evaluates an innovative example from southwest England that provides illustrations, and some lessons regarding necessary capabilities and characteristics for intermediaries, and understanding of their form, functions and modalities. The ‘UpStream Thinking’ project was co-developed by a private water company and an environmental charity. The former translated effective demand from shareholders and water customers for improved raw water quality into finance, whilst the latter had capabilities for catchment-scale on-farm delivery and trusted acceptance as an intermediary. While any sector can potentially provide a PES intermediary, the value driven, not-for-profit and politically neutral voluntary sector proves to be a good fit. Such ‘boundary organisations’ are also well placed for horizontal coordination of catchment management authorities and actions.