Individuals Matter : Exploring Strategies of Individuals to Change the Water Policy for the Tisza River in Hungary

This paper offers a novel interpretation of the introduction of floodplain rehabilitation and rural development into the water policy for the Tisza River in Hungary. It looks at the role of individuals and the strategies that they used to bring about water policy change. Five strategies are explored: developing new ideas, building coalitions to sell ideas, using windows of opportunity, playing multiple venues and orchestrating networks. Our discussion on the importance of each strategy and the individuals behind it is based on interviews, group discussions and a literature review. The international and political attention sparked by a series of floods, dike failure and a major cyanide spill, which preceded national elections, opened a window of opportunity for launching ideas. A new regional coalition successfully introduced floodplain rehabilitation into the water policy arena. Our analysis emphasizes the importance of a responsible civil servant who recognizes a new policy idea at an abstract level and a credible regional coalition that advocates the new idea regionally.

The whole world had already been created when the Tisza was standing alone before the Lord's throne.Then Jesus took a golden plough, harnessed a donkey to it and told the Tisza to follow.Thus he set the plough against the soil and ploughed the bed for the river, which followed faithfully everywhere.However thistles were scattered all around.The donkey, which was feeling hungry reached after one and then another, leaving a straight path.This is why the Tisza is so unpredictable, so winding and meandering.
-Hungarian folk tale

INTRODUCTION
This paper analyzes the early 21st-century transition in water policy for the Tisza River in northeastern Hungary.In the spring of 2003, the Hungarian government issued a decree that marked a substantial shift in water management.The new water policy for the Tisza River recognized rural development and nature conservation as important objectives alongside flood protection.Floodplain rehabilitation and land-use change were introduced as water management measures to replace or complement the prevailing engineering approaches, which primarily favored flood levee construction.From an external perspective, this change in policy was surprising given that for 150-years water management had been dominated by river normalization, flood levees and drainage of floodplains, mainly serving the interests of largescale agriculture.The development and implementation of the new water policy, called the New Vásárhelyi Plan, between 1998 and 2006 is the main object of investigation of this paper.The changes in water policy for the Tisza have been previously analyzed for example, they have been discussed from a governance perspective (Werners et al. 2009).This paper takes a new approach by assessing the role of individual actors and the strategies that they used in bringing about policy change.
We build on our research in a series of Hungarian and international research projects.We collected data in three ways: through twenty interviews with actors from national and regional organizations We then discuss the importance of each strategy and provide a review of the individuals behind it.Our analysis shows the importance of 1) responsible civil servants who recognize a new policy idea at a conceptual level and 2) a credible regional coalition that advocates the policy concept.The international attention and domestic political focus following the 2000 cyanide disaster on the Tisza River, the 2001 floods, and the 2002 national elections provided a window of opportunity for the adoption of the new water policy.Ambiguity about the practical application of new policy concepts and the responsibilities of different actors initially facilitated consensus on the new water policy but has since hampered its implementation.

BACKGROUND: TISZA RIVER BASIN AND THE TRANSITION IN WATER POLICY
A short historical overview of water management in the Tisza River Basin helps provide the context for and arguments why the changes introduced into Tisza water policy may be called a transition in water policy.The Tisza River is the largest tributary of the Danube, receiving water from the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine.The Tisza River Basin holds almost fifty percent of Hungarian territory.Until the 18th century, river management was mainly organized around the operation of a system of small streams and channels regulating the water flow between the main riverbed and the floodplain (Balogh 2002).The inundation frequency determined land use.Mosaic floodplain production systems combined plough land, forest, floodplain orchards, meadows for cattle grazing, and fisheries (Andrásfalvy 1973).Since the 1750s, the Tisza River has been heavily modified.To cater to large-scale mono-agriculture, mills and river transport, the river was canalized and straightened, and the floodplains were drained.The 19th century First Vásárhelyi Plan set out the main changes.Dike building, river regulation, and floodplain drainage decreased the total naturally flooded area by eightyfour percent (see Figure 1).These changes ended the traditional water management system and the related production systems on which the communities along the river had relied (Bellon 2004).
The recurrence and high visibility of floods caused resources to be funneled into an extensive flood defense system (Vári 2001).Over a period of 150 years, deforestation and river normalization made the river flow more extreme and, together with population growth in the low-lying reclaimed floodplain, added to flood risks (Fejér 2004).In addition to flooding, water management was though to contribute to problems such as drought, water stagnation, soil salinisation, and the degradation of peat lands and wetlands (Vámosi 2002).The communist era following the Second World War advanced large-scale tillage and agricultural production systems that required floodplain drainage.Privatization at the beginning of the 1990s led to a drop in the operation and maintenance of the large irrigation systems and a decrease in agricultural output.At present, a high unemployment rate, aging, and migration challenge the region socio-economically (Sendzimir et al. 2004, Linnerooth-Bayer et al. 2006).On a more positive note, the region has great potential for recreation and nature conservation (Vári et al. 2003).
The annual floods that returned in 1998 after twenty years of drought were a driving force behind the development of a new water policy for the Tisza http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss2/art24/Why do we call the development and implementation of the new water policy a transition?Huitema and Meijerink (2009;2010) postulate that a transition in water policy should become visible in a reorientation of the policy substance or the governance paradigm.The water policy endorsed in 2003 explicitly recognizes rural development and nature conservation as important objectives alongside flood protection.Floodplain rehabilitation and land-use change were introduced to replace or complement flood levees that had been the preferred solution in water management for 150 years (Figure 2).The national planning agency VÁTI facilitated the intense collaboration of a large number of regional and national actors during the preparation of the implementation plan.This collaboration broke the hegemony of the water authority.Regional interests were represented by regional organizations such as the new Bokartisz coalition, founded in 2001 by the councils of twelve municipalities, three non-profit organizations (E-Misszió, the Hungarian Environmental Economics Centre and Palocsa Association) and individual scientists (http://makk.zpok.hu/en/node/118).An inter-ministerial committee made major decisions in consultation with regional and civic organizations.At the National Meeting of Environmental and Nature Conservationist Organizations in 2003, the environmental NGO E-Misszió was elected for full membership in the inter-ministerial committee, which allowed E-Misszió to make proposals, vote and veto.Actors involved in the development and/or implementation of the new water policy reported a "paradigm shift" or "new philosophy".The government brochure for the new water policy also captured this shift in its text and new logo (Figure 2c).The brochure also introduced examples of the rural development and nature conservation component of the policy (VITUKI 2004): The government has adopted The substance of water policy and the process by which it was designed mark a transition in accordance with the definition of Huitema and Meijerink (2009;2010).We therefore chose the development of the Tisza water policy as the subject of this paper.

Develop new ideas
In this section, we investigate the origin of the idea of floodplain rehabilitation, rural development, and nature conservation as introduced into Tisza water policy in 2003.We asked different parties about the origin of this idea and whether one person or group of people could be identified as its source.Members from the Bokartisz coalition point to their own organization and specifically to its leader, Géza Molnár, as the key individual behind the idea of floodplain rehabilitation in the Tisza Region.They claim that their work initiated discussion of the idea within the region and brought the idea to the national level.Since the 1980s, Géza Molnár has studied the floodplain management system in the Tisza valley combining field experiments and document analysis (Andrásfalvy 1973, Bellon 1991).Together with a small group of farmers and landowners, he restored and experimented with traditional water steering systems on a small scale at various locations along the Tisza.Based on these two decades of individual experiments and theoretical studies, the founders of the Bokartisz coalition developed their concept of integrated floodplain management and floodplain rehabilitation with the aim of re-creating a mosaic landscape structure and recurring shallow flooding for sustainable rural development.Coalition members began advocating their concept under the name "Last Straw" in 2001 (Botos et al. 2002).It is important to stress that Bokartisz did not present floodplain rehabilitation as something new but rather referred back to floodplain utilization before river regulation.Their concepts derived from the shallow flooding, mosaic land-use, and community management of small-scale water infrastructure that was common in the Tisza region in the period between 1500 and 1700.as a member of the body charged with preparation of the new water policy in 2000 (Zöckler et al. 2000).However, notwithstanding these international influences, integral and participatory planning were relatively new in Hungarian water management.Many people at the water and planning authority had been trained as civil engineers and strongly believed in river normalization.Under the socialist regime, the water authority had always been a strong hierarchical organization with significant financial resources (Fejér 2004).
In the international context, the degree to which introducing floodplain rehabilitation was new is debatable.The concept of river rehabilitation did not originate from Hungary.Hungarian scientists and government officials may have taken inspiration from other countries.For example, in 2000, Hungarian scientists participated in the Conference on River Restoration in Europe that concluded with the following statement: "River restoration is internationally popular.Many river restoration projects are being implemented.River restoration will even get higher attention within the framework of the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive" (Fokkens 2001).Many countries were considering non-structural or "soft" measures from a sustainability perspective (Kundzewicz 2002, Meijerink 2005).Were there signs of investigation of river restoration and rehabilitation in the Hungarian scientific community?
In the seventies, a small number of scientists in the region had studied the traditional water management system.Publications focused on the operation of the traditional system without making a link to present-day water management (Andrásfalvy 1973).In the eighties and nineties, scientists in Budapest engaged in similar studies (Lászlóffy 1982).Karácsonyi (2001) published one of the first papers in English covering the topic.Building on the Association for Local and Regional Development's study (1997), his paper highlighted the benefits of reintroducing the traditional system and floodplain rehabilitation, but did not reference a new water policy.More recently, national and international researchers started to publish on the traditional water management system to cope with present flood risks (e.g., Vári 2001, Linnerooth-Bayer and Vári 2003, Sendzimir et al. 2004).
In summary, we identified two main sources of the new ideas regarding water policy in the Tisza.Those individuals involved with the Bokartisz coalition insist that their group developed the new ideas independently of the government.Members of Bokartisz -and especially its leader -combined elements from historical analysis, theory, and field experiments.In this view, the origin of the new ideas is mostly local.On the other hand, people within the administration point out that some elements were already present in the first version of the water policy and that the new ideas evolved from the interactions during the development of the plan.What emerges from these separate points of view is that the recognition by "both sides" of the ideas as their own, or at least as ideas that were not foreign, may have been instrumental in their incorporation into the water policy in 2003.

Build coalitions to sell ideas
This section explores the strategy of individuals to build coalitions for selling new ideas.Using the definition set forth by Huitema and Meijerink (2009), we define coalitions as groups of actors from more than one organization with shared beliefs and explicit agreements on how to use resources to achieve common goals.Various regional and national NGOs emerged in Hungary in the 1980s that focused on rural development and nature conservation.In the Tisza region, a series of independent, locally driven initiatives began in the 1990s and each aimed to improve the economic and ecological situation at the local level (Government of Hungary and UNDP - GEF 2004).The good thing for our concept was that the plan could not be done between two dikes, and water had to be channeled into reservoirs.The bad thing was that the core of the plan was against the holistic floodplain concept because its only aim was to decrease the flood level between the dikes.There was not much attention to what happens in and between the reservoirs.
Bokartisz held the prevailing water management approach responsible for many problems in the Tisza region.This opinion was supported by scientists who had concluded that the flood defense system had reached its limits, and dike construction alone could not accommodate higher flood levels (Timár and Rácz 2002) In February 2003, the Hungarian government endorsed the decree that included rehabilitation of the primary floodplain and rural development as objectives for the new water policy along with flood protection.These objectives were still far from the main innovation that Bokartisz was calling for: to channel water into the landscape and to connect water bodies.However, Bokartisz became one of the partners in developing the implementation plan and its leaders were thus given the opportunity to "sell" their concept.
These series of events suggest that Bokartisz members managed to convince other parties to consider their new concept.The question is then raised when they felt their ideas were taken seriously and the degree to which they were deliberately strategic in their efforts towards this result.As recalled by a founder of This account suggests that founding the Bokartisz coalition was important in uniting the voice of various organizations in the region that had not previously been heard.The Bokartisz founders developed their concept in time for it to be considered in the new water policy, although they had not timed for this.Instead, the coalition joined the opposition as soon as it considered the new water policy at odds with its own concept.Representing the larger Bokartisz coalition, a small group of two to three people communicated with the central administration.They presented decision makers at the Ministry of Environment and Water with their critique together with their new ideas.Is this account of events enough to explain the transition in water policy?And why did the transition occur at that particular moment in time?Who allowed Bokartisz to become a partner at the negotiation table ?We consider these questions in the next section by reviewing the transition in water policy and key actors from the perspective of "windows of opportunity."

Create and use windows of opportunity
This section assesses whether a window of opportunity was created, recognized or used to launch new ideas.First we describe the three streams that must couple for such windows to be exploited successfully: the problem stream (issue on the public agenda); the political stream (issue on the political agenda); and the policy stream (attention to policy options related to the issue) (Kingdon 1995).
Looking at the problem stream, events began in 1998 with the first major flood in the Tisza for twenty years.The floods that followed annually each produced a new record water level in at least one section of the river (Timár and Rácz 2002).In 2000, the eyes of the world were on the Tisza when, in January, a cyanide spill at a gold mine in nearby Romania wiped out aquatic life and led to several tons of dead fish being pulled from the Tisza.Then, in March, floodwaters rose to a 100-year high.Summer followed with a record-breaking heat wave.Another disaster occurred in 2001 when embankments broke at two places and the Bereg region was flooded, seriously damaging two thousand houses.In Figure 3, we illustrate the problem stream by looking at the Tisza news coverage.We approximate news coverage by the number of occurrences per month of the words "Tisza" together with "water" in Google News between 1998 and 2007 (line in Figure 3 3 is the level of attention paid to the Tisza by the Hungarian parliament.We approximated this attention by reviewing the number of occurrences of the word "Tisza" per year on the parliament website (http:// www.mkogy.hu).Figure 3 shows how the Tisza gained importance on the parliamentarian agenda in 2000 and peaked in 2004 when parliament approved the "Tisza Law".The figure also shows that attention has waned and that the Tisza has not attracted the same level of parliamentary attention since 2004.
A combined account of the problem, political, and policy streams suggest that the 1998, 2000, and 2001 flood events sparked a sense of urgency at the political level to develop a new water policy for the Tisza.In June 2002, a new coalition of socialists and free democrats replaced the conservative, center-right government.The coalition members wanted to put their mark on the ongoing policy process that they had inherited.From this perspective, the autumn of 2002 provided an excellent opportunity for the introduction of new ideas.For the window of opportunity to open, the high visibility of the problem stream, the negative attention for existing policy options and the changing institutional context may have been crucial.As discussed in previous sections of this paper, the Bokartisz coalition had by this time published its ideas and started to actively oppose the existing version of the VTT plan.Support for the existing policy options was waning.
Municipalities and the Hortobágy National Park authority had rejected the location of a reservoir in  communication, 30 October 2006, Budapest).He http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss2/art24/recalls his distress when, after the 2002 national elections, the water authorities were merged with the environmental authorities and their staff and budget reduced.This situation created a need to build new cooperation to ensure successful use of the window of opportunity.He became Deputy State Secretary for Water at the new Ministry for Environment and Water.He suggests that an interministerial committee was installed at his instigation to develop the water policy further.This committee both changed the role of the administration and added a new venue for the transition process.We investigate the role of the new venues in the next section.

Play multiple venues
The previous sections have looked at the origin of the new ideas, the coalitions that were built to sell them, and the opportunities for introducing new ideas into the water policy at a particular moment in time.Here, we ask whether individuals or groups of individuals sought out alternative venues to promote new ideas.We understand venues as the possible places where policy issues can be debated, including various levels of government, the forums of scientists and legislatures, and the media (Baumgartner and Jones 2002).We focus on the choice of venue of the actors identified in previous sections: the national government (particularly the ministry responsible for water policy), the local government (including the mayors and water boards), and the Bokartisz coalition.
By 2000, the EU had become a key new venue for debating policy requirements and funding opportunities (Veres 2004)

Orchestrate and manage networks
Turning to the last of the five strategies, we ask how actors cooperated, what networks played a role in the transition in water policy and whether (groups of) individuals actively influenced the operation of networks.In particular, we analyze whether individuals influenced the breakthrough in the development of water policy for the Tisza by breaking up or providing alternative policy networks.
Such an analysis requires determining what networks shaped water management before and during the transition in water policy.In the 150 years before the transition, engineering solutions dominated water management.The water authority was very powerful, especially under the communist regime.Engineers were partly trained in the Soviet Union (Fejér 2004).A strong, informal network of water authorities and contractors developed during this period, and many of these individuals still remain in key positions today.This network entails cooperation over several decades, but without the collective organization and explicit agreement on spending shared resources that are fundamental to an advocacy coalition such as Bokartisz.
Similarly, the environmental NGOs in Hungary form a strong network in which many individuals in key positions know each other from the communist environmental youth movement.In 2000, the environmentalists were becoming increasingly organized.They stressed that continuing levee construction and the resulting narrowing of the riverbed increased flood risks in Hungary.At the same time, researchers at the Water Resources Research Center VITUKI started to study the merits of water retention (Szlávik 2001a, Szlávik 2001b).
At the regional level, the founders of Bokartisz built on the existing networks of key players in the region.The long-running collaboration (or animosity) between the mayors and other central regional actors extends well beyond Bokartisz both in time and number of actors.Networks were built by people who held central positions in state enterprises (for example, the agricultural cooperatives) and in the administration under the communist regime.In the turbulent times after 1989, well-informed landowners could profit from land consolidation.The consolidation of land around the Cigánd reservoir illustrates the importance of regional players.In our interviews it was suggested that some mayors and large landowners speculated on the location of the reservoir and acquired land shortly before the site was selected.These individuals could benefit from expropriation or from the compensation and the agro-environmental support schemes proposed in association with the reservoir.Such benefits seem to have been more important to these players than any particular water policy.In this manner, they did not manage the transition in water policy but were important in influencing site selection and sitespecific implementation.According to a civil servant from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (personal communication, 25 October 2006, Hortobágy): Local mayors -who might also be members of Parliament -are among the most powerful actors.They have a voice in Ministries, since an important part of ministerial routine is to give an adequate response to initiatives coming from the local administrations; moreover, local mayors have strong capacity to influence the process of practical implementation of the plans and projects.
The research community also deserves notice as a network of actors involved in the transition.Bokartisz members -especially Géza Molnárreport that they took inspiration from scientists to conduct the 1980s experiments in river revitalization.Studies of the traditional management of water and land-use were of particular importance (e.g., Andrásfalvy 1973, Bellon 1991).Following the cyanide spill in 2000, an increasing number of international research projects offered opportunities to discuss, test, and promote floodplain management and river rehabilitation.Individuals from the research community extended their networks through international research and development projects.To summarize, we found strong existing networks at both the national and the regional level.New interactions between these networks occurred around the time of the transition in water policy.
The VÁTI team leader became a major actor due to her facilitation of discussions between the national government, scientists, and local representatives.
The VÁTI team admitted Bokartisz as a counterpart and representative of regional organizations throughout the planning process.VÁTI's facilitation of the planning process and its administration of the tenders for the Ministry of Environment and Water cracked the network of the water authority and its engineers and contractors.

DISCUSSION
What can we learn from the Tisza case about transitions in water policy?The recurring major floods and the cyanide spill on the Tisza River in 2000 were obviously significant, but in what way?
The floods and resulting damage were severe, but these two factors were probably not sufficient in themselves to trigger a transition in water policy.They did, however, highlight the problem stream and support regional NGOs' strategy of defining the prevailing water management as unsustainable and demanding a different approach.Thus, the events proved instrumental in broadening the debate about an alternative water policy.Flood retention and integrated river basin management already had supporters in the national government, the academic world, and major NGOs like WWF.A further observation with respect to the analyzed strategies is the divergent framing of new policy ideas.Whereas civil servants and their technical experts described the new policy ideas as an effective response to new challenges in water management, coalition members stressed that the new ideas had roots in history and tradition and opposed prevailing water management.
With respect to managing networks in the region, legacy effects were strong, with prior social networks and the historic legitimacy of actors determining the nature of the game.Policy analysts should be careful not to overlook the activities of the private sector and consequently omit a potentially important actor and partner.Whereas the origin, advocacy, and management related to the new policy ideas in the Tisza did not lie with bigger private agents, their cooperation became crucial in implementing the new ideas for two important reasons.First, interventions in the floodplain required the cooperation of landowners.Second, implementation of water policy in Hungary could no longer rely solely on national government support.New partnerships had to be built.The new water policy required the cooperation of many partners.It called for an in-depth examination of multi-stakeholder organizations and institutions that were not well understood at the time of the transition in water policy and that represented an emerging and complex factor in many countries around the world.
Finally, it is important to consider to what extent the explored strategies are complementary.Theoretically, looking for 'windows of opportunity' is more oriented towards finding the right time to present ideas, whereas 'venue shopping' is more about finding or creating the right place.In practice in the Tisza case, however, these strategies were found to overlap, as individuals aimed to find the right place at the right time to promote ideas or oppose change.

CONCLUSIONS
This paper focused on individuals and the strategies they used to facilitate a transition in water policy in Tisza.With regard to the two elements of a transition in water policy -change seen in policy substance or in governance arrangements -the Tisza case exhibits little formal organizational change sustained beyond plan development.In fact, actors identified coordination and clarity of the organizational structure as components that have been sorely lacking in the implementation phase (Werners et al. 2009).This is one of the challenges that actors in the Tisza presently face as the implementation of the policy has been slow and could still fail.Close analysis of the role of individuals during implementation may uncover strategies complementary to those we discussed.In addition, an analysis based on stakeholder interest could be a valuable addition to the idea-centered approach taken in this paper.
We explored five potential strategies of individuals: developing new ideas, building coalitions to sell ideas, using windows of opportunity, playing multiple venues, and orchestrating networks.We conclude that these strategies and the focus on individuals offer a simple and edifying frame for exploring a transition in water policy.Assessing the transition from the perspective of individuals and their strategies yields a number of new insights about a turbulent time, with each strategy pointing at different key actors and events.Important lessons include that the founders of a new coalition linked different objectives to their new ideas.Furthermore, while this coalition elaborated its ideas at the regional level, national policymakers recognized a window of opportunity to link regional support to the policy change being advocated and supported financially at the international level.Development of the policy saw new venues and networks arise that proved influential during the transition.Beyond the importance of developing and debating new ideas, the Tisza case shows that it takes individuals to initiate a transition and people that can take new ideas through a period of confrontation, change, and reorganization.

Fig. 1 .
Fig. 1.Tisza River Basin: river regulation has reduced river length by one third and the floodplain area by 80 per cent.

Fig. 2 .
Fig. 2. a) Tisza River at Tiszadada; b) Oxbow lake: traditional water management used oxbows and creeks for water regulation.This inspired the new water management plan; c) Logo and motto for new Vásárhelyi water policy in government brochure (VITUKI 2004); and d) Bicycle lane on retention reservoir dike for rural development (Photos: Werners, 2007).
). News coverage shows clear peaks around the time of the floods inNovember 1998, March 1999, and 2001.The Tisza River received the most attention in international news around the flood and cyanide spill in 2000 and the floods in2001 and 2006.

Figure 3
Figure 3 also illustrates the political stream by tracking the attention paid to the Tisza on websites of the coalition government parties.The figure shows the normalized total number of hits per year for Google searches of the coalition parties' websites.The 2001 flood happened during the election campaigns and attracted sizeable political attention.Judging by website coverage of the topic, political parties' interest in the Tisza also spiked in 2006.This attention coincided with the 2006 elections and another major flood.A second illustration of the political stream in Figure3is the level of attention paid to the Tisza by the Hungarian parliament.We approximated this attention by reviewing the number of occurrences of the word "Tisza" per year on the parliament website (http:// www.mkogy.hu).Figure3shows how the Tisza gained importance on the parliamentarian agenda in 2000 and peaked in 2004 when parliament approved the "Tisza Law".The figure also shows that attention has waned and that the Tisza has not attracted the same level of parliamentary attention since2004.

Fig. 3 .
Fig. 3. Windows of opportunity illustrated by the normalized number of occurrences of specified terms arising from online search using Google.Note: The incorporation of Internet-based figures comes with the recognition that the medium has become increasingly used by political parties and that the number of issues covered on their websites and the number of pages itself have increased.Thus the figure should be read only as an indication of the changing attention of party websites to the Tisza and not as an absolute assessment of the political agenda of the parties.
We propose that linking traditional local water management with contemporary notions of nature http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss2/art24/conservation and rural development prepared the ground for the new coalition to be formed.For the purpose of this paper, we focus on Bokartisz as a case of a coalition aiming at water policy change.
It was a great shock to see the VTT in that form with the 13 reservoirs[...]it was against our concept as Géza analyzed it.
In 2002, the state-owned Water Resources Research Center (VITUKI) won the European commission-funded Tisza River Project on sustainable use of water resources and http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss2/art24/ The management of interests and (financial) resources, either to facilitate or slow the transition in water policy, emerged as a strategy.A witness of the changes in the Bodrogköz stated that (personal communication, 23 October 2007, Bodrogköz) "[t]hose opposing the plan thought it would never pass parliament.When it did, they were shocked.The easiest and most efficient way to block it is though the budget."Related to interest management were strategies that sidestepped good governance principles such as transparency and accountability.These strategies of individuals deserve more attention in future research.