Eifel-Rur: Old Water Rights and Fixed Frameworks for Action

This chapter summarises our analysis of drought governance in the Eifel-Rur region of Germany. Within the Interreg IV-B project DROP a team of researchers from five universities and knowledge institutes performed two field visits to the Eifel-Rur region and held interviews with authorities and stakeholders. The visits were facili-tated by the DROP project partner Eifel-Rur Waterboard (Wasserverband Eifel-Rur, WVER). Interviews were both individual and in group settings; in the second visit interim results were presented to stakeholders in a workshop. Stakeholders inter-viewed included representatives from drinking water producers, nature protection authorities, industrial water users, farmer representatives, electricity generating companies, environmental NGOs,fishermen, sailing schools, and local (municipal) and regional (district) authorities in charge of water management. The analysis was guided by a drought-specific Governance Assessment Tool (GAT), which uses five governance dimensions (levels and scales, actors and networks, problem perceptions and goal ambitions, strategies and instruments, responsibilities and resources) andfour governance criteria (extent, coherence, flexibility and intensity) in its analysis.In the following, we present the context of water management in the Eifel-Rur region, describe some drought actions which have already been implemented, explain the results of our analysis in terms of the Governance Assessment Toolkit and present our recommendations for improved drought governance in the region.An aspect of the Eifel-Rur water management system which is central for its drought governance is the water rights' system in place. The region's water rights—some of them centuries old—provide their owners with very strong legal claims to the resource; furthermore, the current system of rights and charges does not provide real incentives for users to reduce their water rights/water use. These features make the demand side of the water system very inflexible. In addition, the region's significant number of reservoirs allows for a very stable supply of water over time,which means that users are not prone to include risks related to water supply into their risk strategies. This lack of flexibility poses significant challenges for drought management, some of which are taken up in the final section "Conclusions and case-specific recommendations".