Municipal Lake governance Developments in Latvia: Towards Complex Approach Management Practice

Latvia has a significant number of lakes, even eventually more as 10 000 as they never been fully accounted, but just comparatively small number are subject to lake governance, since the entire national lake governance system is still under development and currently mostly municipalities themselves are step-wise developing and realising lake management plans, but municipal capacities vary significantly. According to EU Water framework directive, there are four river basin management systems established in Latvia, having related water and risk management documents in place, as well as, in the past decade, there have been both national and regional level planning guidelines developed for lake and river waterbodies management, but all mentioned has been not yet utilized in local practice, having some legal responsibilities’ and admin capacities’ deficiencies. Despite this, there has been seen slow improvement of the water quality and socio-economic usage of lakes, but more in the lake management practice is to be done, accounting also for climate change. The goal of this research was to study the municipal level lake management practice developments, applying general research-and-development (R&D) framework approach and researching particularly the status and development trends of the three governance’s dimensions’ employment – governance content by socio-ecological system (SES) approach, governance segments as for main stakeholders’ involvement and participation, as well as, the set of governance instruments, especially, institutional/administrative ones. There were chosen pilot municipalities, having diverse and successful lake management approaches utilised, and, for the first study stage, document analysis and semi-structured interviews with related municipal specialists were done, using case study research (CSR) methodology application. There were recognized five lake management approaches, even in most municipalities in Latvia, particularly in rural ones, lake management is traditionally done by the scarce municipal territory administrative units and Utilities departments/services, and, only limited number of municipalities, also particularly studied, have developed and are employing for lake management also nature resource/environmental departments, while only in few municipalities there are established special municipal lake management agencies. Promising looks NGO sector management approach used by some municipalities, both top-down either bottom-up establishment chosen to apply, but as most perspective could be recognised complex approach (cross-sector) management practice, where most or all above mentioned approaches are combined and complementary supporting each other, within particular municipality. All studied municipalities possess certain lake management success stories, to be studied further in very detail, however, in general, there is to be seen still limited understanding and utilisation of the SES approach, also still potential of various stakeholder’s involvement and pro-active development of all complementary governance instruments, even many of instruments are available in studied municipalities, but lake communication instruments (information, education/training, participation and lake-friendly behaviour) are mostly underdeveloped.