Actionable knowledge for sustainability at the water-land nexus: An inquiry into governance and social learning in two river basins in Luxembourg

The thesis offers in-depth empirical insights into diverse factors that foster or hinder collective capacities of actors to address sustainability challenges at the water-land nexus. It focuses on how relations, knowledge, and practices in diverse organisations and professions engaged in governance and social learning processes in the Syr and Upper Sûre river basins in Luxembourg have changed following the entering into force of the EU Water Framework Directive in 2000. Finding that contradictions in water and land systems grow while spaces for self-organisation and meaning-making shrink, the thesis raises fundamental questions concerning both dominant supply- and productivity-oriented paradigms and managerial approaches to sustainability. New governance approaches are needed to foster social learning and actionable knowledge, embracing interrelations between ecological and social dimensions of sustainability.