Water Quality Governance 

Understanding the political life of chemicals

Outline

The Water Quality Governance project is a three year project of Frank Hüesker and Robert Lepenies that deals with the most significant water pollution issues in Germany and Europe. Water pollution problems are complex and involve many actors, interests and governance constellations. There are gaps especially in the implementation of ambitious water legislation across different levels of governance. This is often because chemical pollution is treated uniformly, and not enough attention is paid to governance challenges of specific pollution problems and pollutants. In our project, we introduce a phase-model of (micro)pollutants and track the political life of different chemicals in order to better understand the politics of water pollution in the case of four pollution types: pesticides, nitrates, pharmaceuticals and microplastics. We investigate the expectations that relevant actors in the policy fields have of state actors and develop theories of pollution that can explain the persistence of pollution problems. The project is household funded by Helmholtz and integrates the work of all research units at UFZ.