Case Study 1: Matarraña River Basin - Euwareness

Apart from that, there is a medium level of integration between scales of governance,
even though interaction —not necessarily integration— between regulation adopted at
different levels of government and actors operating at different territorial scale is
increasing. Instead, the level of integration as it regards the strategy and instruments
and the responsibilities and resources for implementation are low. The administrations
responsible for the implementation have not co-ordinated their policies and resources
for implementation are disperse. In addition, the river basin administration, while
constituting the natural and hydrological unit, does not seem to have the technical,
cognitive and strategic resources to design integrated and cohesive policies estimating
the impact of human activity on the river basin, the real water needs, the forms of
satisfying these needs in an efficient manner, and the environmental consequences of
its proposals.
8. Some interpretative lines
Once the story lines of the Matarraña river case have been described, this section
attempts to give some interpretative lines regarding the two central questions to the
EUWARENESS research project, that is to say:
What and how changes towards a more integrated regime have been produced?:
Regime change (independent variable ) integration (dependent variable)
And does integration lead to more sustainable use of the resource?:
Integration (independent variable) sustainability (dependent variable)
8.1. Explaining changes
The Matarraña river case shows certain signals of regime change. In this case regime
change occurred relatively independent of changes of national determinant and is more
prominent as regards the governance system rather than the regulative system.
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