Water issues in comprehensive municipal planning: a review of the Motala River Basin

The performance level for water management is rising in Sweden after the passing of a number of Governmental Bills (1997–2000) that establish national environmental quality objectives, and furthermore after the adoption of the Water Framework Directive of the European Union (2000). The presentation of water issues in municipal physical planning is important because the municipalities have a local planning monopoly. We investigate to what extent water resources are considered in one of the most important tools for the regulation of physical infrastructure, namely the Comprehensive Municipal Plans. Thirteen plans from municipalities within the Motala River Basin in southern Sweden were studied. To characterise the comprehensiveness of the plans we used twelve criteria, divided into five groups: description, preventive measures, goal-setting, implementation strategy and future-oriented considerations. Descriptions of water quality, water use, wastewater plants, and urban water and wastewater systems were the most frequent items. These topics could be found in all plans in the study, along with more or less elaborated river basin perspectives. Issues related to national environmental quality objectives were mentioned in only five of the plans, and considerations about water flows were even more rare. We found, that the emphasis on water issues is not correlated with the size of the municipal population but rather with the age of the plans. In the old plans from the early 1990s water management is less recognised than in the newly revised ones. After their adoption the national water quality objectives, and suggested measures to fulfil them, are being translated into regional and local levels, and this has happened in the new plans. However, it seems that water has not yet gained the same importance as land in municipal physical planning, and strategies for public participation in the planning process are lacking.