The Ontological Fallacy of the Water Framework Directive: Implications and Alternatives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that in many cases the failure to reach the implementation goals of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) is not due to a lack of political will or to implementation deficits; rather, it is due to a fundamental conceptual problem that we characterise as an ontological fallacy that is built into the directive. This ontological fallacy is founded on a radical conceptual separation of nature from human society, one which Bruno Latour identified over 25 years ago as the "modern Constitution" (Latour, 1993). We draw mainly from research in political ecology to develop this argument; in the process, we discuss some of the main features of what we call the WFD system, especially the concept of 'reference conditions' and the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework. We build on this critical research by analysing controversies in England and France that surround efforts to attain good ecological status for water bodies under the WFD. Our paper is intended to help address what Boeuf and Fritsch (2016) identify as "a conspicuous lack of theory in WFD scholarship". We argue that unless European water policy is placed on a more realistic ontological footing, it risks losing political legitimacy as well as popular and scientific credibility.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.028 | 0.048 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.031 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".