Understanding the achievement of EU water policy objectives in agricultural landscapes: insights from the Institutional Design Principles and Integrated Landscape Management approaches

The EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) adopted in 2000 set the objective of protecting and restoring water bodies across Europe. Despite the implementation of multiple regulatory and incentive-based policies to achieve the EU WFD objectives, diffuse pollution from agriculture remains a major threat on water quality. Decentralized cooperation involving water suppliers and agricultural stakeholders for limiting diffuse pollution in drinking water catchments has been recently developing in the French and European contexts. These cooperative arrangements rely on self-regulation among the key actors (water suppliers, farmers and other stakeholders) and target specific areas such as water catchments or water protection zones. The paper aims to identify the drivers and barriers to the achievement of EU water policy objectives in the agricultural sector by adopting a landscape perspective on water quality management. We apply a conceptual framework combining the Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) and the Institutional Design Principles (IDP) perspectives to analyze cooperation initiatives involving water suppliers and agricultural stakeholders to protect drinking water catchments from agricultural diffuse pollution. Three cases representing different cooperation types and water catchment areas in rural landscapes in France were investigated on the basis of primary data collected at the local, water-basin and national levels. The results show that the success of multi-stakeholder collective action depends on both local factors such as the characteristics of the water resource and stakeholders (knowledge, resources, trust and social capital) as well as on factors linked to the EU and national water and agricultural policy frameworks. Besides the identification of the drivers and constraints on the implementation of EU water policy in agricultural landscapes, the analysis highlights the conceptual added value in combining the IDP and ILM approaches for understanding collective action processes for water pollution control at the landscape level.