Regional Governance and Management for Drought Adaptation in North-West Europe

On 7 October 2014, Ecologic Institute's Rodrigo Vidaurre held a presentation on regional governance responses to increasing drought risks at the 2014 international conference "Our Climate – Our Future", organised by the Helmholtz Network for Regional Climate Change. The talk, part of the Conference Session on "Integrated strategies for climate change mitigation and adaptation", presented the methodology and insights generated by an analysis of the regional governance settings. This work is part of the Interreg IVB project DROP. The presentation slides are available for download.

The talk started with an introduction of the Governance Assessment Tool applied in the project and examples of the kind of insights it delivers. To convey to the audience the benefits of a comparative methodology, the presentation included a comparison of 3 of the 6 case-study areas. The comparison shows that responsible organisations tend to repeat approaches they have used previously for other topics, thus limiting the variety of actions and their possible impact. Whereas there is no "one-size-fits-all" solution for the variety of different geographical and institutional settings analysed, transferrable lessons can be gleaned from the approaches that have worked well in other regions.

The presentation rounds up with some suggestions on how governance regimes in the 3 regions can use new tools/approaches to increase the drought resilience of the water management system.