WHAT IS THE LEVEL OF PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IN PLANNING FOR RIVER BASIN MANAGEMENT IN ROMANIA?

The governance through public participation in the decision making process is encouraged by the Water Framework Directive. In order to understand the characteristics of this water governance issue in Romania, our study investigates the public's response to consultation actions during the elaboration of the second cycle of the national River Basin Management Plan. We therefore searched to answer two main questions: i) which actors took part in public consultation actions and ii) what kind of suggestions did they make? The analysis is based on information published in the annexes of the River Basin Management Plan from which we extracted participating actors and their commentaries. We found that, among actors, public authorities were dominant (67%), followed by stakeholders from the economic sector (23%), NGOs (5%) and research and education actors (3%). Only 35% of them brought suggestions, the most active being the public authorities and NGOs. They referred mostly to the Programme of Measures by identifying problems related to various types of water pollution (biologic, by nutrients or priority substances - 41%) and river dynamics (erosion, floods - 25%), together with the necessary measures to be taken. Among methodological issues (16%), some commentaries about the prioritization protocol from the Programme of Measures were made. Even if there were fewer commentaries on governance issues (11%), we found suggestions concerning the necessity to better connect actors to each other and to improve public information/education/ awareness. When compared to studies conducted on the same subject in other states of the European Union, we found a similar part of involvement of the public in river basin management (e.g. consultation, proactively involvement of public authorities instead of NGOs). The suggestions brought by the actors appear to be relevant for the river basin management in Romania, therefore higher forms of cooperation between actors from various sectors should be strongly encouraged.