Deciding and knowing for radical environmental policy change
Authors:   , Valin Nina Zoé 
Published: January 2025

European waters, like in many other places in the world, are suffering from anthropic activities (most significantly, industrial and agricultural activities), which result in phenomena of eutrophication, pollution, alteration of the physical habitat and its functioning, and biodiversity loss. Waters are also becoming scarcer due to climate change and the effects of droughts, sometimes causing serious societal and economic challenges.

This research project is interested in the governance of this environmental crisis, at European and national levels. It looks in particular at the most renowned legal response to such crisis: the so-called Water Framework Directive (WFD). Set out by the European Commission in 2000 to achieve ‘good ecological status’ in all European water bodies by 2027, the Directive has triggered various interpretations from member states, but overall, none of them is likely to reach the target. What can explain current disappointment of what was expected to be an innovative and ambitious environmental Directive?

Our research traces back the overall journey of the WFD, building on the hypothesis that the mutual entanglements between science and policy have had implications at various points in time and space on the redesign of European water institutional settings. The fundamental aim of this research is to reflect on the need and possibilities for environmental policy change, and to propose alternatives or insights to current functioning of the science-policy interface involved in European water governance. This thesis should inform policy on the role and potential of expertise in policy change. For this, the following research questions are addressed:
1. How does politics influence the ways in which expert advice is interpreted, concretised, and operationalised into legislative proposals?
2. What makes a policy evaluation transformative, that is, a turning point in implementation practices rather than a guardian of stability?
3. To what extent do science-policy boundaries at national level (i.e. the relationship between the State and expertise) influence implementation choices and design of the WFD?

Qualitative methods are being used, notably via document and interview analysis relying on the coding software atlas.ti. Each chapter focuses on a specific phase of the journey of the WFD: the first two chapters revolve around its development and formulation (1994-2000), chapter 3 tackles iterative evaluations of the Directive (in 2012 and 2019) and chapter 4 reflects on the overall implementation trajectory of the Directive in four member states (2000-today). Along with this evolution in time, the thesis also progresses from more theoretical to more empirical contributions, and from a European to a national and regional governance level.

The final chapter concludes this thesis with a so-called ''transcoding'' framework that can be used to study the agency of experts in the development trajectory of policy innovations. It presents the different strategies that experts may use to overcome political and institutional constraints to environmental policy change, and further provides recommendations towards science-policy collaborations that actively promote environmental actions to face the water and climate crises. Finally, it draws perspectives for future research, by proposing critical points that require scholarly attention.