Dutch Regional Water Authorities: institutional change and continuity versus environmental challenges: Paper in het panel Comparing water level management at the local level in England, the Netherlands and Flanders 1500 to the present, Congres van de European Society for Environmental History (ESEH), Bristol, GB, 4-8 juli 2022.

Dutch Regional Water Authorities: institutional change and continuity in the face of Environmental challenges

Herman Havekes, University of Utrecht
Petra van Dam, Free University, Amsterdam

Paper ESEH, Bristol, June 2022, 1-7-2022, presentation version

Introduction
This paper is about the history of the institutional metamorphosis of the Dutch Regional Water Authorities in the 20th century.
There are several good scholarly and societal reasons for this. First the scholarly reasons:
1) There is a lively debate about public institutions for water management in environmental history. Classical questions are how centralized or decentralized such institutions are, to what extent they can be regarded as commons, and more recently questions are how changes in the institutions for water management are effected by environmental changes or factors, and perceptions thereof.
2) In the political, administrative and juridical sciences, there is a lot of attention for governance. A recent publication describes this as the administrative organisation of water management, the legislation, the planning, the financing, the public participation and stakeholder involvement and the cooperation inside and outside the water management sector.
3) Also, i.e. the classic lacuna-argument, recently a large research project on the early modern history of the Dutch Regional Water Authorities has been finished, you may have enjoined listening to the paper by Milja van Tielhof about this, but for the period after 1800, much needs to be done.

Then the societal reasons:
4) There is an increasing societal awareness about the relevance of public water management institutions, and that, of course, in the context of our troublesome relation with water. Floods and extreme droughts are the order of the day, we fear sea-level rise and some call this a global water crisis, and demand a water transition.
5) Also societal concerns exists about governance, an example is the reporting of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In 2016 it focused on the governance of water management and developed a number of principles for good water governance.
6) There is a significant global trend towards decentralisation in the water management sector. However, local organisations are often set up with (too) few legal powers and financial resources. In that sense, studying this recent history of the Dutch regional water authorities is useful, because, after a centuries-long history of relative institutional stability and successful performance, weak power and finances became the problem in the 20th century.
This paper describes the great institutional changes in the Dutch Regional Water Authorities (RWA’s) and seeks an explanation in environmental problems leading to new demands of society, and taking into account bottom-up and top-down political and administrative impetus.
Let us start with a brief survey of the history before 1945.

History of regional water authorities until 1945
From the thirteenth century onward regional water authorities were formed. They looked after the regional water system, like big canals and lakes and major sea dikes and river dikes. In some cases, the RWA’s acted as high courts of justice for the local water authorities, a the village level.
Regional water authorities were mostly formed in the low-lying peat and clay grounds of the country in the north and west. On the high lying sandy grounds in the south and east of the country, the first regional water authorities only appeared in the nineteenth century.
The regional water authorities had their own financial resources. Originally, maintenance was performed with payment in kind, like labour obligations, but after the middle ages, water levies were installed based on landownership. From then on professionalization took place, hand in hand with a growing level of bureaucracy. Their tasks included: designing bye-laws, giving out licenses aimed at protection of the waterworks, carrying out checks, punishing offenses, levying tax, and contracting enterprises to carry out the maintenance work.
The boards consisted of a public prosecutor or chairperson (‘dijkgraaf’), depending on the area, and 5-7 trustees (‘hoogheemraden’). The boards of the RWA’s were recruited from prominent members of the group of large landowners, drawn from the nobility, monasteries and towns in the area. This was done by co-option without elections.
This situation remained almost stable during the period of the Republic, 1581-1795, but after that a series of large changes occurred, laid down in several large laws.
The regional water authorities survived the French era (1795-1815), when Napoleon tried to centralise public administration. In 1795 all administrative bodies were dissolved and sent home, but the regional water authorities survived. Water management was deemed to be too important to be left unattended.
The first somewhat improvised constitution of 1814 of the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, specified the concepts of care for the water structures and institutions of the regional water authorities. The newly installed provinces were assigned the task of supervising the regional water authorities and were authorised to amend their regulations. The newly appointed King had supreme control over the water structures.
The thorough constitution of 1848 designed by the famous statesman Prime Minister J.R. Thorbecke, provided for a Regional Water Authorities Act (RWA Act) , but nothing came of it. It was considered to be impractical to legislate for the hundreds of regional water authorities existing by then, with their many and very diverse regulations in a single law. Probably, the regional water authorities did not welcome any interference from government either.
However, some changes did occur or had already occurred in a less formal and organized way. In 1841 the jurisdiction of the regional water authorities came to an end. In compensation, the regional water authorities were awarded a number of new powers, including administrative enforcement and immediate execution. That means that in case of emergency, the board can act and spend money without permission of the representative bodies.

 
Changes after 1945: metamorphosis of the regional water authorities
After the Second World War the regional water authorities underwent an institutional reform that is unprecedented in the Dutch public administration sector. The number of regional water authorities, the legislation embedding them in the state structure, the composition and election of the management board, the range of duties and the financing, all have changed radically. It is fair to say that the regional water authorities were reinvented during this period.
Why did this happen and what did this institutional evolution involve? First the Why.
Reasons for Change: Flood 1953, new environmental demands, new tasks
Flood 1953
An important reason for change was the unfamous Flood Disaster of 1953. It was caused by a once-in-a-century storm surge that also ravaged over the British isles. The Northsea rose to extreme heights, dikes were flooded and broke all over in the south-west of the Netherlands. When airplanes flew over the area one day after the flood, , the province of Zeeland seemed almost entirely disappeared. The flood resulted in 1836 victims and caused major material damage:175.000 ha flooded, 10.000s of animals dead, 50.000 houses destroyed or damaged.
The flood was not just a natural disaster, but a human-induced disaster, to cite a term coined by environmental and climate historiann Pfister. Water defence works in the region were in a very bad state. Dikes were too low, sluices and other wooden gates were not closing well. Also alarm systems did not work properly. The national broadcasting service received messages from Scotland about millions of trees falling down, but stopped broadcasting on Saturday night to honor the Sunday rest. Messages by telegram or telephone from the national storm surge alarm service and the provincial water department were not picked up because officials were not connected to the system or because they were feasting. One should realise that people in this area were used to storm surges and it was difficult to decide if a storm surge would be really dangerous.
At the Ministry of Water Management, already since the 1940s (i.e. before WWII!), knowledge existed that the dikes were too low in the region. A number of reports were written about the issue, including proposals for improvement, but they did not get political support.
The technological response to the disaster was the building of the world-famous Delta Works, a series of enormous barrier dams that closed off all the sea outlets in the region. This was a project of the central Government funded by parliament through a special act. The heap of existing reports much helped to speed up this process.
However, for this paper the more relevant response to the disaster was an urgent call for a great reorganisation of the regional water authorities. They were responsibe for the hundreds kilometre of sea dikes and this structure had obviously failed. The cause seemed evident. In 1953 too many existed and they were far too small and too weak. In the province of Zeeland alone, more than 300 regional water authorities. Their scale did not match their tasks. When the regional water authorities were founded, dikes were still small. The land had sunken since then, due to natural soil changes, and reclamations had made the sea inlets smaller so that the sea rose higher. Also demands of agriculture had increased, winter flooding of the lands was not accepted anymore . Consequently, the dikes had become bigger and bigger. By the 20th century the high dikes had become very costly and the many small regional water authorities simply did not have the means for proper maintenance anymore. Also they had no means to take out loans for big works. After the war, this situation was even more critical due to the economic trend. So the 1953 flood led to a demand for institutional change, but one can also interpret this as the final rise of a lobby for change that was desired already by many for a long time.

new environmental demands & new tasks for the RWA’s
For the institutional changes there was another impetus. After the WWII a new consciousness developed among water politicians, managers and engineers that high quality clean surface water was desirable. Ultimately this ‘water civilization’ led to a large new task for the RWAs: water quality management including waste water treatment.
The surface water in cities and in the countryside was becoming more and more polluted since the end of the 19th century, this is when the Industrial Revolution really took off in the Netherlands, very late! Several factors contributed to the water pollution. Cities built Sewage Drainage Systems that transferred the filth from the city canals to the countryside waters. Everywhere all sorts of industry polluted water with organic and, increasingly, chemical waste water existed. Famous examples were the Cheese Factories and Vegetable conserves industries, that turned the water in the ditches, respectively, white (milk residues) and black (rotting plant parts),.
Already before the war the beginning of an environmental movement in favour of clean water is discernibe, for instance in the Dutch Society against Water-, Soil- and Air Pollution (1936). Also some professional specialists and officials at several levels of government, including water authorities, started to work on monitoring and thinking about improving water quality. Already from 1917 onwards, some large RWAs started to issue conditioned licenses to industry for emitting waste. These early pioneers were inspired and aided by the think-tank of the National Institute for the Treatment of Waste Water (RIZA, 1920). However, only after the war knowledge about the treatment of waste water developed further. As a sort of trial, in the 1950s and 1960s some ten RWAs were tasked with the treatment of waste water, supported by a small change in an old law, the Hindrance Law (1952).
Over time the pressure for better surface water quality mounted. The environmental movement of the sixties culminated in several famous reports making the larger public and the parliament aware of the serious pollution of the environment, including the water. You all know these: starting with the publications of the American biologist Rachel Carson and leading up to reports of the United Nations and others, like the Report of the Club of Rome (1972).
Finally, in 1970 Dutch parliament passed a new law that regulated the responsibility for water quality, the Pollution of Surface Waters Act .
The new Act allocated the task of water quality management to the provinces, which, after some institutional trials, was delegated to the regional water authorities. More over from the mid-1980s onward Government policy was aimed at combining the new tasks into one administrative organization and this became the RWA’s. Because the new Water Treatment Plants were so expensive, this development aided very much the merger of RWA’s. Once it was established that the RWA’s were responsible for both water quantity and water quality management, they were given also other tasks, like the care for ground water management (2009) and the control of muskrats and swamp rates (coypu) (2011), invasive species that threatened the dikes by digging holes in them.
So both the flood of 1953 and the rising demands on water quality led to a need for institutional change, that however, was already felt much longer in circles of institutional specialists.

 
Embedding in the state structure & changing the structure of representation
Some important legislation defined the position of the RWA’s and their institutional changes in the second part of the 20th century and we concentrate here on the RWA Act of 1992 (Waterschapswet). A first attempt in the 19th century had failed. And since then the constitution had no special section for water management.
In the light of the desires for changes, a new attempt to make a real general RWA Act was undertaken. In 1983 a constitutional amendment to this end was approved by parliament, Article 133, providing for the making of a general RWA Act. This change of the law had along history, it been advocated by the Study Committee on Regional Water Authorities already in 1974 and in the 1977 Policy Memorandum Towards a new regional water authority system? . The new RWA Act was created and passed this time and duly came into force on 1 January 1992.
The central position of the provinces with respect to the regional water authorities was reaffirmed, but the State was given the authority to overrule the provinces, where necessary. The Act of 1992 not only stipulated the institutional structure of the regional water authorities (tasks, administrative composition and elections, powers, taxes and supervision), but also the definition of a public participation regulation that obliged the regional water authorities to include every stakeholder in the decision-making process, and that was to cause a revolution.
An advantage for the efficiency of governance of the new Act was that the law had become much more uniform, more transparent and easier to apply. Whereas before the provincial regional water authorities’ regulations took up whole volumes, after 1992 they required just a few pages. This reduced the influence of the provinces and increased that of the State.

Increase of scale
The most salient feature of the institutional changes is the reduction of the number of regional water authorities. While there were still 2647 regional water authorities in 1950, in 2022 the number had fallen to 21.
A good example is the province of Zeeland that was hit so badly in 1953. It had more than 300 regional water authorities, today this province has only one.

 
New administrative structure
The revolution due to the new law of 1992 was that the composition and election of the regional water authorities boards changed radically ( 18 and 30 seats)
The boards used to mainly include seats for the ‘unbuilt land’ (the farmers), but due to the new laws they also included seats for all Dutch citizens (inhabitants), businesses and nature reserve managers.
In addition, the individual candidate system, in which individuals stood as candidates for the board elections, was replaced by a list system in which political parties and other nationwide or regional groups nominate candidates. There is some common sense in this. In the (much) larger regional water authority nobody knew the candidates any longer.
The representatives of the inhabitants, who make up the majority of the boards were elected directly. The representatives of the farmers, businesses and nature reserve managers (7 to 9 seats), were appointed by their pressure groups.
This new structure has persisted. Around 50% of the Dutch electorate ( 7 million people) voted in 2019 in the elections for the regional water authorities’ board. Not many Dutch people were enthusiastic about the new type of election. In order to promote the turn-out, the elections are held in combination with the elections for the boards of the provinces and that is effective.

New financial structure
The financial situation of the regional water authorities was very problematic after the Second World War. They could only borrow money at high interest rates to pay for all the investments that were required in the water management sector. Moreover, only the agriculture sector paid water taxes. Two changes improved this. situation.
Firstly, the Dutch Regional Water Authority Bank (Waterschapsbank) was founded in 1964, which was and is the only water bank in the world. This bank enabled the regional water authorities to borrow money for their investments at low interest rates.
Secondly, following the increase of voters, the jurisdiction of the regional water authorities to collect levies was extended to the entire population of the Netherlands. So in addition to farmers, this was residents, owners of houses and industrial building, and nature reserves.
This development was in line with the well-known adage which formed part of the oral culture of the water authorities: interest-pay-say: only people who pay have a say in decision taking.
It has created a more solid financial basis for the regional water authorities.
As a result and unlike the Dutch provinces and municipalities this made the regional water authorities almost completely self-supporting. So there is no special State fund for the regional water authorities as there is for the provinces and municipalities. By now they receive 3.2 billion euros yearly, exclusively for water management .

 
Enviro-technological innovation
To close this survey of institutional change, we want to make a short degression and point to the high level of technological innovation which is often very imaginative and even nature-inclusive.
The famous polder windmills and their successors, the steam-driven and electric pumping stations, were replaced by fully automated pumping stations.
Several waste water treatment plants are being converted into ‘Energy and Raw Material Factories’ in which energy is being produced and valuable materials (such as phosphate) are being extracted from the waste water.
The R&D organisation of the regional water authorities (STOWA) has developed the Nereda concept for sewage water purification that is based on the cooperation of special bacteria.
In water defence building with nature is trendy, like using sea currents and wind to build dikes, but the dikes get ever larger. A new idea is building parking garage in the interior of the sea dikes, which is a wonderful tool for the seaside villages to promote beach tourism. Also an experiments is using inflatable rubber dams (Ramspol), instead of expensive and complex dike reinforcements (Noord-west Overijssel).

Conclusion
Currently all of the Netherlands is divided into regional water authorities, including the urban areas.
For 700 years, the regional water authorities had the main focus on agriculture, since the fifties they have developed into a much more broadly-oriented institutions that take various interests into account, and that is in large part due to their new task, the responsibility of water quality.
In the years to come, the regional water authorities will have their hands full with climate change, the rising sea level, soil subsidence, urbanisation and the energy and water transition. Because of their metamorphosis into very strong institutions in terms of governance, we hope they will be successful.


 
Reserve
Change and continuity
The previous section maps out the major institutional changes that the regional water authorities went through over the past 75 years in particular. Those changes were necessary. These changes were too radical to be categorised as fine-tuning, but it seems that the essence of the regional water authorities has been maintained.
1)In the first place, there is the circumstance that a regional and local community in a particular area takes care of its own water management in a public context and is relatively autonomous in the way it does this.
2) In the second place, the regional water authority community has its own (democratically chosen) management board composed of the stakeholders in the area. The regional water authority was and therefore is a real ‘interest group democracy’. Enabling those stakeholders to vote directly on the administrative decisions taken by the regional water authority generates good stakeholder involvement and means that decisions have a larger support base.
3) In the third place, there is the financial autonomy of the regional water authority. Unlike the provinces and municipalities – the other local authorities in the Netherlands – which largely depend on the Government for their income, the stakeholders in the regional water authority area generate the requisite financial resources themselves, making the regional water authority almost fully self-supporting. At the same time, that tax income is earmarked: it may only be spent on water management. This administrative and financial setting shows that the age-old adage of interest-pay-say still has an important part to play.
4) In the fourth place, the task of the regional water authority is still exclusively concentrated in the area of regional and local water management. The advantage of this is that the regional water authority can fully concentrate on this task and can build up a high level of expertise. A regional water authority knows all the water structures in its area, down to the last ditch. This knowledge is necessary in order to protect the water interests of everybody in the area. That range of duties also has an intrinsic cohesion: surface water and ground water, towards quantity and quality. This offers clear efficiency benefits.
5)In the fifth place, the modern regional water authority has strong regulatory and enforcement powers, including such instruments as administrative enforcement, penalties and administrative punitive orders. They provide the regional water authority with a powerful set of legal instruments to enforce compliance with the water regulations, where required. And that is necessary, because violation of those regulations can jeopardise the safety of many.
6) In the sixth and last place, just as in the past the regional water authority is deeply embedded in the Dutch state structure. It performs its tasks in relative autonomy but not in isolation and is assured of provincial and State supervision. The province and the State define the standards that the regional water authority must comply with – for example, for the dykes, water nuisance and the waste water treatment plants. Where necessary, the province and the State can also annul decisions made by the regional water authority if they conflict with the law or the public interest. This is consistent with the form of government pursued in the Netherlands, which is a decentralised unitary state.

Dutch Water Management anno 2022
Here we place the RWA’s in the total picture of the water management of the Netherlands.
Water management is undertaken at all levels of government: central government, provinces, regional water authorities and municipalities. In real terms, the tasks are shared as follows.
The central government (Ministry for Infrastructure and the Environment) is responsible for national water policy while and one of its agencies, the Directorate General for Public Works and Water Management (Rijkswaterstaat (RWS), is responsible for managing the hydrological main system consisting of the North Sea, the IJsselmeer lake, the Wadden Sea, the Eems-Dollard estuary, the Zeeland delta waters, the major rivers and a number of canals. The central government also bears responsibility for the coastline and is manager of four major flood defence structures (the Afsluitdijk and the Eastern Scheldt, Maeslant and Ramspol barriers); and it manages the main navigation channels.
The (21) regional water authorities are responsible for water safety and manage the water quantity and water quality of all other waters, including groundwater and waste water treatment. In that connection, they manage approx. 6,100 pumping stations, 230,000 km of drainage ditches and approximately 325 waste water treatment plants. They also manage approx. 3,450 km of primary flood defence structures and 14,000 km of other flood defence structures. The regional water authorities are also responsible for the control of muskrats and coypu [explain]. In certain cases, regional water authorities are also in charge of navigation channel and road management.
The (12) provinces are responsible for regional water policy and the issuing of permits for three categories of big groundwater extraction (for drinking water, industrial extraction in excess of 150,000 m3 per year and for so-called geothermal energy systems). They are also responsible for regional navigation channel management.
The (344) municipalities are responsible for managing sewerage systems. They also have legal duties of care for rainwater run-off and urban groundwater levels.
Finally, the (10) water supply companies are responsible for the public drinking water supply. With the exception of the Amsterdam Waternet, which has the legal form of a foundation, these are private companies. However, the Drinking Water Act (2009) specifies that the ownership of these companies must be in public hands, which effectively qualifies them as semi-public organizations.
This overview demonstrates that the water organization in the Netherlands is almost entirely public while and extremely decentralized. However, the private sector does play an important role in water management, besides the production of drinking water, also in the construction and strengthening of dikes, the building of pumping stations and waste water treatment plants, the maintenance of waters and the building and replacement of sewerage systems. These are tasks not undertaken by government.
The highly decentralized structure is partially a result of the historical perspective as we have demonstrated in this paper. Some people are of the opinion that decentralization of water management has some evident advantages: small bureaucracy, high efficiency, distribution of administrative powers, effective checks and balances, diverse control opportunities, use of local knowledge and closeness to the involved stakeholders, who are part of the decision-making process. At the same time history shows this can only be fruitful and successful if the decentralized authorities have sufficient staff, skills and knowledge, a range of administrative powers (ordinances, permits, fees, law enforcement), an adequate financial position (own tax income)( and a strong relation with important stakeholders).