Complexity and control: how do they work in PPPs?

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Images of coordination : how implementing organizations perceive coordination arrangements

A crucial challenge for the coordination of horizontal policy programs those designed to tackle crosscutting issues is how to motivate government organizations to contribute to such programs. Hence, it is crucial to study how practitioners in implementing organizations view and appreciate the coordination of such programs. Assisted by Q-methodology, this inductive study reveals three significantly different "images" centralframe setting, networking via boundary spanners, and coordination beyond window dressing Most surprisingly, different images show up among respondents within the same organizations and horizontal programs. The authors find that the images reflect elements of the literature: the resistance to hierarchical central control, the need for local differentiation and increased incentives, and a collaboration-oriented culture. Most importantly, practitioners of implementing organizations perceive top-dawn mechanisms as ineffective to achieve coordination and ask for adaptive arrangements, involvement, and deliberative processes when designing coordination arrangements and during the collaboration

Effects of management practices on water yield in small headwater catchments at Cordillera de los Andes in southern Chile

In several parts of the world, drinking water is obtained from springs in natural and managed mountainous forests. Since forests regulate quality as well as quantity of water, the effects of forest-management activities on water yield are an important subject of study. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of forest management on water yield in managed and unmanaged temperate native rainforests in the Andean range of southern Chile. The study area is located in San Pablo, a forest reserve of 2,184 ha located at the Andean range of southern Chile (39º 35’ S, 72º 07’ W, 600-925 m a.s.l.). From April 2003 to October 2008, seven experimental small catchments were monitored for rainfall, throughfall, stemflow, soil water infiltration, soil water percolation and runoff. In 2002, one catchment with a secondary deciduous forest was managed, through thinning, causing a reduction in basal area by 35% whereas the other one remained unthinned as control. Both watersheds are adjacent and are located at 600 – 720 m of elevation on deep loam textured volcanic soils (100 - 120 cm). In November 2006, a watershed covered with evergreen old-growth forests was thinned extracting 40% of the total basal area whereas another adjacent catchment remained unthinned as control. Both watersheds are located at 725 – 910 m a.s.l. and have the same aspects. The effects of management of deciduous secondary forests showed that for the period April 2003-March 2007, the mean value of the increase in total annual streamflow was 12.7%, ranging from 10.9% to 14.6%. Thinning of the evergreen old-growth forest increased the streamflow for the period November 2006-October 2008 with 6.1%, ranging from 4.4% to 7.8%, with greater differences during summertime (15.7 to 206%)

Mapping Specialisation and Fragmentation of Regulatory Bodies

The objective of the Flemish database is to determine the current level of proliferation of regulatory bodies and to map how regulatory regimes are structured (i.e. what kind of organizations are involved and what are their characteristics?). This paper explores whether there are ‘groups’ of regulators who share certain characteristics with other members of the same group, but differ from other groups. In specific, we test whether the sector in which a body is active and the level of government to which it belongs, have an impact on the organisational form of the body and the tasks it performs. We find that economic regulators differ significantly from other areas. They are more insulated from politicians, are more specialised and seem to have a relatively strong legal mandate. The level of government seems to be a relevant explanatory factor as well. Federal bodies are more insulated from government than other levels. In addition, they are more specialised in regulation and have a rather limited legal mandate. The results confirm the relevance of comparing different regulatory areas and levels of government.

A stochastic design rainfall generator based on copulas and mass curves

The use of design storms can be very useful in many hydrological and hydraulic practices. In this study, the concept of a copula-based secondary return period in combination with the concept of mass curves is used to generate point-scale design storms. The analysis is based on storms selected from the 105 year rainfall time series with a 10 min resolution, measured at Uccle, Belgium. In first instance, bivariate copulas and secondary return periods are explained, together with a focus on which couple of storm variables is of highest interest for the analysis and a discussion of how the results might be affected by the goodness-of-fit of the copula. Subsequently, the fitted copula is used to sample storms with a predefined secondary return period for which characteristic variables such as storm duration and total storm depth can be derived. In order to construct design storms with a realistic storm structure, mass curves of 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th quartile storms are developed. An analysis shows that the assumption of independence between the secondary return period and the internal storm structure could be made. Based on the mass curves, a technique is developed to randomly generate an intrastorm structure. The coupling of both techniques eventually results in a methodology for stochastic design storm generation. Finally, its practical usefulness for design studies is illustrated based on the generation of a set of statistically identical design storm and rainfall-runoff modelling

Local sensitivity analysis for compositional data with application to soil texture in hydrologic modelling

Compositional data, such as soil texture, are hard to deal with in the geosciences as standard statistical methods are often inappropriate to analyse this type of data. Especially in sensitivity analysis, the closed character of the data is often ignored. To that end, we developed a method to assess the local sensitivity of a model output with resect to a compositional model input. We adapted the finite difference technique such that the different parts of the input are perturbed simultaneously while the closed character of the data is preserved. This method was applied to a hydrologic model and the sensitivity of the simulated soil moisture content to local changes in soil texture was assessed. Based on a high number of model runs, in which the soil texture was varied across the entire texture triangle, we identified zones of high sensitivity in the texture triangle. In such zones, the model output uncertainty induced by the discrepancy between the scale of measurement and the scale of model application, is advised to be reduced through additional data collection. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis provided more insight into the hydrologic model behaviour as it revealed how the model sensitivity is related to the shape of the soil moisture retention curve