Understanding the issues surrounding groundwater governance is a precondition for developing policy recommendations for both national and transboundary groundwater governance. This review discusses groundwater attributes relevant to the design of governance systems and provides a systematic...

Ex-ante impact assessment of agricultural, environmental, and rural policies has become an integral part of political decision-making processes in the European Union. While a variety of agri-environmental modelling tools exists, ex-ante policy assessment tools capturing the institutional...

The grammar of institutions developed by Crawford and Ostrom presents a common syntax for analysing institutions and dismantles them into their components. This is a promising undertaking given the huge diversity of definitions of institutions, even within a single discipline. Additionally, the...

This paper discusses various concepts of power. Its goal is to shed light on a better method for implementing the power concept. The case of Bulgaria's water user associations' failure shows the abuse of power by local actors who fear they will lose their influence and the private benefits that...

The introduction of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union was an important step for Bulgaria and Romania. However, their administrative capacity for managing CAP instruments is still evolving, and they face challenges in delivering services that are crucial for implementing...

Examining a natural resource management system, we show that what first looks like rigid path dependency is actually stepped incremental change. The theoretical question then arises of whether it is possible to predict when a natural resource governance system will follow such an incremental...

Agri-Environmental Schemes are a voluntary policy measure of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union. Since 2004, these have been implemented in the post-socialist new Member States. Agri-Environmental Schemes could help to achieve a higher level of biodiversity on agricultural...

It is broadly agreed that development needs and effects from changing environment will increase pressure on the ways natural resources are utilized and shared at present. In most parts of the world, resource stress has already reached unprecedented levels setting resource sustainability high on...

To date, the land–water–food nexus has been primarily addressed from an ecological, hydrological or agronomic angle, with limited response to the governance interface between the input resources. Likewise, in widely used heuristic frameworks, such as the social–ecological system (SES)...