INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS

Overview

Whether a Nature Based Solution can be implemented depends less on its merit than on who has the authority to decide, who pays, who maintains it, and which rules permit it. The institutional analysis is the systematic review of those questions: the organizations and institutions that matter for risk assessment and management in a given area, the roles and responsibilities they hold, and the policy messages that follow.

What it covers

The analysis works at three levels. At international and European level it identifies the policy frames within which nature-based approaches are already justified or constrained, and the obligations that Member States have undertaken. At national level it maps the competent authorities for water management, flood risk, spatial planning, agriculture and nature protection, and the instruments each of them uses. At local level it maps the bodies that actually take decisions about land and water, which frequently are not the bodies that the national framework anticipates.

Across those levels the analysis records, for each institution, its formal mandate, its resources, its accountability and its relationship to the others. It identifies where mandates overlap, where a responsibility exists without a budget, and where the authority to approve a measure sits with a body that bears none of the consequences of it. These are the points at which an otherwise sound intervention stalls, and the analysis is designed to find them before implementation rather than during it.

The comparative element is what makes the analysis transferable. The same method was applied to several demonstration areas with different administrative traditions, which allows the comparison of how similar objectives encounter different institutional arrangements, and the identification of changes that would make nature-based approaches operable under more than one of them.

What it produces

The output is a characterization of the institutional setting of an area, a set of core policy messages addressed to the bodies identified, and guidance on the methods for carrying out the analysis elsewhere. It supports the definition of implementation and investment plans, because an arrangement that cannot be given effect by an existing institution has to be redesigned or given one.