ABSTRACT
Finding the ‘right’ scale to govern water is probably impossible. Nevertheless, the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) provides strong advocacy in this regard. In its quest to find ‘the right geographical scale’ for water management the WFD advocates management within hydrographic regions while respecting national differences in the set-up of responsibilities (CEC 2007). As a legal requirement it asks all European member states to undertake water planning at the basin level (Thiel and Egerton 2011; Meyer and Thiel 2012). This chapter looks at the case of the southern Spanish Guadalquivir River basin. In contrast to the above advocacy of the basin level at the European level, in 2008 the Spanish national and subnational Andalusian governments decentralized water management to the regional level of Andalusia, abandoning River Basin Management (RBM) and thereby disempowering the central state administration.
