1st capacity building session, 28 July 2026
The first webinar of the NENUPHAR capacity building series was held online on 28 July 2026, co-hosted with two sister Horizon Europe projects, GREENHOOD and SEACURE.
The subject was governance: how the organisations involved in nutrient management decide things together, and what makes those arrangements work.
Six speakers covered governance theory, a company case and three regional experiences:
- Greetings, introduction to the NENUPHAR project and webinar series (Marina Cardenas Herrero, CIRCE)
- Basics on governance: concept, implications for nutrient management (Csaba Bálint, Institute of Agricultural Economics/AKI)
- Corporate innovation and capacity building – the case of ProfiKomp, a Hungarian waste management company (László Aleksza, ProfiKomp Zrt.)
- Contribution to innovation ecosystems and policy building by the SEACURE project (Beray Cayli & Agnese Boccalon, ACR+)
- Spanish governance case study by NENUPHAR (Paula Costa Domech, BETA Technological Centre)
- Governance practices established by the GREENHOOD project (Enol Nieto Jiménez, BETA Technological Centre)
The main messages can be summarized as follows:
Governance is not a substitute for government. Law and enforcement stay where they are, and what changes is who takes part in shaping and delivering them. Nutrient pollution needs this because it behaves like a wicked problem, with no agreed definition and no final solution, and because no single authority holds all the information, the resources and the legitimacy to settle it alone.
The decisive distinction is between point and diffuse sources. A wastewater plant can be permitted and inspected. Agricultural land cannot, and that is where governance arrangements make the difference.
On the question of level, the answer was put simply: set the legal framework nationally, then design the practical implementation locally, with the people it affects. A narrow start is legitimate. Origin based and holistic approaches are not rivals, and work on a single source can later be folded into a wider system.
Words matter here. Information, consultation, coordination, co-production and collaborative governance describe different arrangements, and only the last of them genuinely shares decision making power. Promising partnership and delivering consultation spends trust that is hard to earn back.
From the corporate side, the message was that the European legal framework and the technology are both largely in place, so the binding constraint is economic. Compost sells for around 10 euros per tonne while its nutrient content is worth 30 to 40.
The three projects converged on the same practical lessons. Governance analysis works as a building block for the technical work rather than as an add-on. Getting a balanced group into the room is difficult and takes several rounds. Private sector participation is low and needs a clear business argument. Planning should follow the river basin rather than administrative borders. Stakeholder fatigue is a real risk when several projects approach the same actors, so the three agreed to link their autumn meetings in Central Catalonia instead of running them separately.
The concern running through all of it was continuity. The Ebro Community of Members is being handed from NENUPHAR to GREENHOOD, with the aim that it becomes a Mesa de Concertación that survives without project funding.
Download PDF’s below:
