Distribution Without a Balance

On 16 July 2026 the national water distribution committee escalated to feitelijk watertekort, an actual water shortage. From that moment the verdringingsreeks, the statutory priority ranking, turns from a framework on paper into the instrument by which scarcity is actually distributed: which function takes precedence over which, and who runs out of water first.

That summer the instrument did what it was built to do. The problem lies in what is missing around it, and that is two different things.

The first is a gap in coverage. The ranking applies to surface water. Groundwater falls outside it, and for a substantial share of abstractions from it there is no permit or notification duty. At the moment the distribution binds, the question therefore shifts to the source of which nobody holds a complete picture.

The second is a gap in accountability. What an authority publishes with a far-reaching decision is the threshold value and the category from the ranking. What it does not publish is the weighing: how much commercial damage against how much certainty about a dike, and which lighter variants were considered. The order is public; the proportionality is not.

The two gaps have the same shape. In both, the authority is present and the insight is absent, and that insight sits with a party other than the one that must decide. An organisation carries out its task with an architecture built for a different task, and is therefore unable, at the moment of its heaviest decision, to explain why.

Beneath both lies a third gap, assumed here rather than treated: the figure that dominates the public drought conversation is a demand quantity and not a balance, and by construction cannot contain a stock. That measurement side is worked out separately in What the precipitation deficit does not measure.

The distribution instrument and its outer edge

No legal power hangs on the precipitation deficit. There is no millimetre value at which anything enters into force. The real distribution instrument is the verdringingsreeks, the statutory priority ranking that determines which uses of water yield first in times of shortage. It is anchored in article 2.42 of the Environment and Planning Act and elaborated in article 3.14 of the Living Environment Quality Decree: four categories, the order of the first two fixed nationally, that within the third and fourth open to further specification by the province in its environment ordinance.¹ Since 16 July this is no longer theory. Under an actual water shortage the ranking is the framework within which water is distributed, and the restrictions on abstracting water from the ground, from brooks and from ditches are its visible elaboration.

The ranking applies to surface waters. Groundwater falls outside it, with one opening: a province may declare the order of categories three and four applicable to groundwater as well.² That opening has been examined and advised against, with reasons. A 2024 legal exploration commissioned by STOWA, the water authorities’ joint applied-research foundation, concludes that a priority ranking for groundwater is for now not a good idea, because groundwater responds slowly and the instrument is a crisis instrument: you are always too late. The recommendation is instead to map out per region how much groundwater there is, how much is abstracted annually and how much is replenished, and on that basis to set regional abstraction ceilings.³ That is a convincing argument, and it closes the circle. The instrument that should distribute the stock does not work for the stock. The instrument that does work, the ceiling, presupposes precisely the measurement that does not exist.

What that means in practice became visible on 1 August. The Hoogheemraadschap van Delfland — the water authority for the densely populated strip between The Hague and Rotterdam — closed all locks in the Rotterdam and The Hague regions for an indefinite period, by its own account a measure without precedent, because with the locks open roughly a thousand litres of fresh water per second disappear to sea. The justification is a stock figure, not a millimetre figure: the freshwater stock in the area is shrinking fast, and the water is needed to prevent damage to dikes and to protect nature and water quality. At the same time a ban on abstraction from surface water came into force in an area of roughly one and a half million inhabitants.⁴ The same report contains the sentence that sums up the whole analysis: some farmers can fall back on their groundwater wells, tens of metres deep.

The moment the distribution instrument actually binds, demand thus shifts to the source for which no ranking, no ceiling and no complete registration exists. That is the predictable consequence of a framework that covers one of the two stocks. The restriction of scope to surface waters is the substitution path, and it opens on the day the scarcity is genuinely being distributed.

The precision that does not make the trade-off visible

The mirror image stands in Twente, in the east of the country. On 23 July Rijkswaterstaat announced that the locks at Eefde would close to shipping from Saturday 25 July at noon, together with a ban on abstracting canal water for irrigation. The justification is explicit and refers to the priority order laid down after the drought crisis of 2003: the stability of flood defences, the prevention of soil subsidence and irreversible damage to nature rank highest. On the stretch between Almelo and De Haandrik the water level must stay at least 9.10 metres above NAP — the Amsterdam Ordnance Datum, the national reference level for elevation — because the quay there doubles as a flood defence and can subside below that level.⁵ As far as is known, it is the first time the canal has closed because of drought; fifteen to twenty thousand vessels pass the locks at Eefde each year.⁶

Here nothing is missing from the measurement. There is a hard threshold in centimetres, an identifiable manager, a published justification and a category in the priority ranking that explains the precedence. That is the opposite of the precipitation deficit, and yet it runs aground at the same point. The ranking determines the order, not the magnitude. It says the flood defence takes precedence over shipping; it does not say how much shipping is given up for how much certainty about that defence, and it says nothing about whether a lighter intervention would have achieved the same.

The public administration scholar Ira Helsloot pointed to that gap in a public contribution: there is no published cost-benefit analysis, and there is no document stating what the irreversible damage to nature amounts to in this case and how it was weighed. His explanation is structural and deserves to be adopted without the polemic that surrounds it: when an administrative body is not liable for the social costs of a decision that turns out disproportionate, internal safety professionals can settle on the very safe side without any burden of accountability.⁷ Whether that happened here cannot be established, and that is precisely the finding. The counter-argument that the standards were tightened for good reasons after the subsidence of the peat dike at Wilnis in 2003 — when a drought-desiccated dike gave way and flooded a residential area — may be just as true; it too cannot be tested from the outside.

What sharpens the case is where the discussion then took place. The questions about the level compartment used (the peilvak, the bounded area for which a single target water level is set), about the effectiveness of pumping and about lighter alternatives such as grouped lockage or a navigation ban for recreational craft were asked by professional peers in a comment thread under a social media post, not in a public document the manager had to answer. Measurability of the threshold thus produces no accountability for the trade-off. It is the same construction error as in the foregoing, in the opposite direction: there a number without a decision, here a decision without a visible weighing.

Whoever does not publish the weighing leaves the interpretation to someone else

Up to this point that is a professional objection. In the first week of August it became something else.

After Delfland announced the abstraction ban, greenhouse growers in the area — horticulture under glass is concentrated precisely in this part of the country — sought publicity with the message that they felt ambushed. Member of Parliament Mona Keijzer asked questions in line with that position, among them what objective data the decision is based on and whether the minister will commit to a solution in which entrepreneurs do not pay the price for administrative choices. On X she wrote that an administrative body was once again choosing “rules and models”, a phrasing that deliberately connects to two files in which those words have become politically charged: the nitrogen crisis, in which model-based limits froze permits and construction, and the law that distributes asylum reception across municipalities.⁸

That question is legitimate, and it is moreover the right one. The problem is that the answer to it does not exist in publishable form. What is public is the threshold value and the ranking. What is not public is the weighing: how much business damage against how much certainty about the flood defence, which lighter variants were considered, and which assumptions underlie the regional water system. A decision of which only the outcome and the category are visible leaves exactly one public register, and that register is already occupied. Whoever does not publish the trade-off leaves its interpretation to whoever can fill it in fastest.

The rest of the conversation shows why facts cannot repair this as long as the balance is missing. The association of water companies reports that there is enough water. A drinking water company adds the nuance that the tap works but frugality is called for. The greenhouse horticulture lobby states that usable treated wastewater is flowing out to sea. The water authority says the freshwater stock is shrinking fast. Each of those statements can be correct within its own system boundary. There is no shared regional balance in which they cancel out against one another, so the dispute cannot be settled on facts. It shifts to credibility, where the most recognisable frame wins.

Meanwhile the position of the executing body is changing. The president of the Dutch Water Authorities (Unie van Waterschappen, the national association of the water authorities) observes that water authorities are increasingly becoming an ordinary government, with the corresponding disadvantages: requests for exceptions, enforcement officers who feel tense about going out, a criminal complaint over the threatening of an enforcement officer, a threatening letter to his own address, and the finding that what the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security (NCTV) describes in its threat assessments now also arrives at the water authority.⁹ That is a shift of function. For years the water authority appeared in the news as a discharger of water, usually after downpours, usually locally. Now it acts as a keeper of water, nationally visible, distributing scarcity between parties with opposing interests. The entire architecture described above — the indicator, the distribution instrument, the missing measurement duty — was built for the discharge task. The legitimacy question is now arriving at a layer of government that is operationally prepared for it and administratively not.

The picture, then, is not one of a society in revolt. At the Vechtstromen water authority, in the east, enforcement officers on the first day after the abstraction ban found farmers already rolling up their irrigation reels of their own accord, and the succession of dry years since 2018 has demonstrably increased understanding. Where interest organisations are in permanent conversation with the water manager, as with the bulb growers and tree nurseries in the Rijnland area, acceptance proves highest. Support thus follows the degree to which the trade-off can be followed, whatever the severity of the measure. And the pace at which that support is being tested is higher than planned. The extreme drought of this summer was foreseen in the scenarios of the 2025 report Toekomstgericht Waterbeheer Rijnland (Future-Oriented Water Management Rijnland) only several years from now.¹⁰

What this asks

The diagnosis has been on paper for years. The measurement and registration duty for groundwater abstractions stands as a structuring choice in the policy letter Water en bodem sturend (Water and Soil as Guiding Principles) of November 2022 — the cabinet letter that declared water and soil the organising conditions of Dutch spatial planning — together with the intention to set a groundwater ceiling per area in which the small abstractions also count.¹¹ It recurs in the advisory report Goed water goed geregeld (Good Water Well Regulated) by the Council for the Environment and Infrastructure, the government’s strategic advisory body on the living environment; in a parliamentary motion of July 2023; and in a 2024 report that works out six building blocks for further regulation of the smaller abstractions, of which the measurement and registration duty is the minimum variant.¹² Knowledge and support exist; what is missing is a party that must answer the question about the stock and can be held to account for it.

Two things can be done without changing the law. Publish, with every far-reaching drought measure, the trade-off and not just the threshold value, including the lighter alternatives considered, so that the order of the priority ranking does not take the place of the proportionality question. And make the regional abstraction ceiling the instrument the conversation centres on instead of the crisis distribution, because the ceiling is the only form in which a statement about the stock leads to a decision for which someone can be held to account.

That last point is structural. As long as the balance is missing, every distribution decision is a decision without shared ground, and that makes it contestable in a way that better communication cannot repair. The dijkgraaf — the chair of a water authority — who explains that he must choose between wet dikes for hundreds of thousands of people and water for a grower who may go bankrupt is right about the order and stands alone on the question of how much. That is the heaviest place to stand alone.

At the end of a dry year we know to the cubic metre how much water has flowed past Lobith. As long as no one is obliged to explain how much has been taken from beneath the sandy soils in that same period, we are measuring this year’s drought and not next year’s.

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Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years of experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and quartermaster at municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants, and at inter-municipal collaborative bodies across the social and physical domains. Statecraft is his platform for strategic reflection on public-sector execution, pillar IV of House of Viridian.

Responses and counter-arguments via Statecraft.nl.

Footnotes

1. Article 2.42 of the Environment and Planning Act (Omgevingswet) in conjunction with article 3.14 of the Living Environment Quality Decree (Besluit kwaliteit leefomgeving, Bkl); further specification within categories three and four on the basis of article 7.13 Bkl. No shifting between the categories is possible. For the elaboration per use function, see the Handleiding verdringingsreeks (manual on the priority ranking), published via the Informatiepunt Leefomgeving, iplo.nl. ↩

2. Article 7.13 of the Living Environment Quality Decree. No example has been found of a province that has used this power; the 2024 legal exploration assumes the situation that no such ranking exists anywhere yet. ↩

3. Peter de Putter, Juridische verkenning verdringingsreeks voor grondwater en mogelijkheden voor een actief grondwaterbeheer (legal exploration of a priority ranking for groundwater and options for active groundwater management), presentation at the STOWA webinar of 7 March 2024, stowa.nl. See also Studiegroep Grondwater (Groundwater Study Group), Grondwater: onzichtbaar en onmisbaar (Groundwater: Invisible and Indispensable), 28 November 2022. ↩

4. Boris Bouwman, ‘Alle sluizen in regio Rotterdam en Den Haag gaan vanaf woensdag voor onbepaalde tijd dicht: vergaande maatregelen’ (“All locks in the Rotterdam and The Hague region closing indefinitely from Wednesday: far-reaching measures”), NRC (a leading Dutch newspaper), 1 August 2026. The discharge of roughly a thousand litres per second with the locks open is taken in that report from RTV Rijnmond, the regional broadcaster for the Rotterdam area. ↩

5. Rijkswaterstaat, ‘Twentekanaal vanaf zaterdag gestremd voor scheepvaart, ook onttrekkingsverbod op kanaal’ (“Twente Canal closed to shipping from Saturday, abstraction ban on the canal as well”), 23 July 2026. ↩

6. NOS (the Dutch public broadcaster), ‘Drukbevaren Twentekanaal gaat voor het eerst dicht vanwege droogte’ (“Busy Twente Canal closes for the first time because of drought”), 24 July 2026. The canal last closed in 2012, then because of a damaged lock gate. ↩

7. Ira Helsloot, public contribution on LinkedIn responding to the NOS report, July 2026, with reactions from professional peers. The factual claims made in the same thread about the level compartment used and the water-level rise achieved after closure have not been verified and are not adopted here. ↩

8. Bas Blokker, ‘Bedreigingen én begrip voor waterschappen vanwege droogtemaatregelen’ (“Threats as well as understanding for water authorities over drought measures”), NRC, 7 August 2026. The parliamentary questions by MP Keijzer and her post on X are cited there. ↩

9. Idem. The statements quoted are by Jeroen Haan, president of the Dutch Water Authorities and dijkgraaf (chair) of the De Stichtse Rijnlanden water authority. ↩

10. Idem, with reference to the report Toekomstgericht Waterbeheer Rijnland (2025) and to the observation by the Vechtstromen water authority after the abstraction ban of 28 July 2026. ↩

11. Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, policy letter Water en bodem sturend (Water and Soil as Guiding Principles), November 2022, structuring choices on groundwater. ↩

12. Council for the Environment and Infrastructure (Raad voor de leefomgeving en infrastructuur), Goed water goed geregeld (Good Water Well Regulated) (2023); motion by the members Van Ginneken and De Groot, 6 July 2023; report Melding- en vergunningplicht (kleine) grondwateronttrekkingen (2024), in which six building blocks are worked out. ↩