Analysing water governance in heterogeneous case studies—Experiences with a database approach

Many resource management problems arise from failures of governance. A better understanding of governance regimes is therefore essential for a sustainable management of natural resources. This paper presents an approach that aims to gain insights into water governance regimes by combining a shared language for comparative analyses of case studies from different social and environmental contexts with relational databases. The shared language utilised is the “Management and Transition Framework” (MTF), a conceptual framework that allows comprehensive analyses of water management. The MTF was turned into an operational tool through the usage of a relational database, which facilitates the storage of large amounts of data and provides the possibility for structured analyses. Explorative analyses were performed for two case studies in order to exemplify the potential of the approach for the examination of vertical integration in flood management.So far experiences let us conclude that the presented approach increases the comparability of heterogeneous case studies and facilitates systematic analyses. This is a prerequisite for the derivation of general insights into the effects of different types of governance regimes on the performance of water management. More cases need to be recorded in the future to ensure a sound statistical base for robust analyses.