The design and implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) in Germany has clearly been inspired by the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) concept. The paper shows, however, that Germany's current river basin management follows a light version of IWRM, by only coordinating...

Understanding the issues surrounding groundwater governance is a precondition for developing policy recommendations for both national and transboundary groundwater governance. This review discusses groundwater attributes relevant to the design of governance systems and provides a systematic...

Examining a natural resource management system, we show that what first looks like rigid path dependency is actually stepped incremental change. The theoretical question then arises of whether it is possible to predict when a natural resource governance system will follow such an incremental...

To date, the land–water–food nexus has been primarily addressed from an ecological, hydrological or agronomic angle, with limited response to the governance interface between the input resources. Likewise, in widely used heuristic frameworks, such as the social–ecological system (SES)...

This contribution focuses on the interaction between structural change in agriculture and the availability of key natural resources – land and water. The relationship is not unidimensional; therefore, we propose three dimensions of resource-induced structural change. The first dimension...