The role of institutional and legal constraints on river water quality monitoring in Ukraine

For achieving any kind of river basin management, monitoring is a pre-requisite: However, for monitoring to be successful, the broadly applicable legal and policy mechanisms for facilitating data exchange, public participation, implementation and compliance must also be present. Ukraine as a member of several international agreements directly concerning management and protection of freshwater, and other broader environmental agreements indirectly affecting transboundary water management, aims to improve its national water management framework by introducing river basin management. This paper examines current gaps between Ukrainian water legislation on RBM and EU and other relevant international water law. Specifically, the paper shows how far monitoring requirements have been fulfilled and identifies shortcomings. The following deficits in river water quality monitoring exist in Ukraine which are (1) biological data are not sufficiently collected by the authorities and (2) monitoring of hydromorphology is not systematically conducted. Taking into account the current political and economic crisis, the paper proposes a short-term oriented solution which is to entrust the River Basin Administrations with more tasks, because they have experience in monitoring, they are directly linked with the State Agency for Water Management that is in charge of implementing IWRM and they are allowed a basic budget for financing staff. But in the long run strategies are to be developed that secure proper monitoring with effective standards and resources for authorities who take over these tasks.