From State-Centered Decision-Making to Participatory Governance – Planning for Offshore Wind Farms and Implementation of the Water Framework Directive in Northern Germany

Rhetorically at least, environmental policy in the European Union has taken a shift towards more comprehensive, participative, and co-operative forms of governance. Examples are the 2002 Recommendation on Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) and the 2000 Water Framework Directive (WFD). Designed to resolve specific environmental problems, they also address the process of decision-making itself. In this paper we ask whether two current planning processes in the German North Sea coastal region show evidence of these new forms of governance. We find that the process of issuing planning permission for offshore wind farms is still largely hierarchical and fails to link up to more comprehensive forms of sea use planning. In contrast, the process of implementing the WFD leads to comprehensive, strategic, and participatory River Basin Management (RBM) in Schleswig-Holstein. The case studies represent distinctive modes of governance that exist at the same time in the same place.