Ambitious goals and ambiguous issues : Integrating water and energy concerns in the Norwegian hydropower sector

The EU Water Framework Directive represents a common framework for water policy designed to improve and integrate the way water bodies are managed throughout Europe. This complex and innovative directive engages multiple actors and sectors, involves changes in the institutional, organizational and spatial set-up of water resource management, and calls for the integration of the different interests and policy goals. Based on secondary data analysis and qualitative semi-structured interviews, the article investigates how the new EU water policy affects the management of water recourses in relation to Heavily Modified Water Bodies and hydropower in Norway. The illustration of the Norwegian case helps gaining more insight into the implementation process in a country that, besides not being a EU member, relies mainly on hydropower for its electricity generation, hence needing even more effective energy-water policy integration. Conclusions reveal that, while the complexity of the organizational structure has increased in response to the WFD, the path towards major coherence and integration with the hydropower sector has seemingly not been supported by changes in the legislative framework. Despite the space created by the WFD for institutional reforms, the Norwegian case shows that domestic water quality ambitions and the WFD implementation process are profoundly influenced by broad political and economic conditions. Indeed, the importance of the hydropower sector makes of the implementation of the WFD a highly politicized issue and the country seems locked in a pre-existing path determined by a historical distribution of responsibilities in the water policy field and the established political-institutional structure.

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