ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that when water managers are obliged to manage riverside property behind the dykes as a consequence of spatial water management they are planning in an unknown arena. Water management and spatial planning have essentially different approaches to managing land. The chapter describes the different modes of governance of institutions and explains how these are institutionally embedded in the law. It provides an outsider's, Dutch, perspective new insights into the entrenched particularities of German legislation: namely the role of condition-based and of performance-based legislation. The chapter further talks about the performance-based legislation focuses on the result of an executive activity; the purpose or aim of a regulation is determined and it is left to the administrator how those aims are to be met. It describes that Dutch planning law the Wet op ruimtelijke ordening (WRO) is developing increasingly into performance-based legislation.
