Catchment management as a systemic socioecological challenge: developing cross-scale approaches to critical pressures

Policies aimed at improving the ecological status Europe’s waters have proliferated over the last few decades, and evolved significantly as the ‘wickedness’ of critical pressures like eutrophication became increasingly apparent. Most noteworthy is the evolution towards integrative and participatory approaches based on hydrological boundaries, an approach that is the foundation of the EU’s Water Framework Directive. While there have been some improvements, including reductions in nutrient inputs to Europe’s waterbodies, 60% of Europe’s waterbodies still fail to reach good ecological status. Clearly, there is a need to understand how the integrative and participatory approaches that have emerged in the last ~20 years can be strengthened to realise water quality goals. This thesis contributes to this goal by investigating how ambitions for catchment management to be (i) systemic, (ii) multi-scalar and (iii) participatory, can be realised in practice, with a focus on mitigating eutrophication. These three aspects are often held up as pillars of good catchment management; however, there is little work that explicitly looks at the significance of scale and how to approach ‘cross-scale’ management when addressing eutrophication as a systemic socioecological problem. Equally, the role of participation in supporting systemic cross-scale management is under-explored despite its potential value in water management. To address these critical gaps, this thesis presents three pieces of interdisciplinary and participatory research: (i) a case study in Stockholm, Sweden that shows the value of integrating systemic perspectives on scale into management, supported by participation, (ii) a case study in Scotland that demonstrates the value, challenges and limitations of collaborative catchment partnerships in supporting cross-scale management, and highlights how their role may be evolving, and (iii) a conceptual paper that suggests principles for approaching systemic cross-scale management of eutrophication and realising the value of participation for achieving this goal. Together, these pieces of work make strides towards establishing how socioecological cross-scale management can be implemented in practice to strengthen mitigation efforts, and how participation can support these efforts. By doing so it adds to the literature that demonstrates the value of participation in water management and environmental management more broadly. Overall, this thesis represents an important step forward in response to oft-repeated calls for managing eutrophication systemically and collaboratively ‘across scales’ that have yet to be answered.