The shortage of drinking water capacity is being treated in The Hague and at the provinces as a permitting problem. That is a mistake. A drinking water extraction site does not get off the ground more slowly because a form sits too long on a civil servant’s desk — but because, underground, scarce space is being claimed that farmers, nature managers and housing developers also lay claim to. Anyone who fails to organise that conflict in advance solves nothing by speeding up the procedure. The delay simply shifts from the permitting desk to the administrative court.

The urgency is by now beyond dispute. Research by sector association Vewin shows that all ten drinking water companies need extra production capacity before 2030, three of them immediately. In total this amounts to more than 100 million cubic metres per year of additional extraction. At the end of April 2026, the Council for the Environment and Infrastructure (Rli) warned bluntly that drinking water is becoming scarce and that security of supply is under pressure. In a growing number of municipalities, drinking water has now become a brake on new housing construction — precisely the pattern we know from grid congestion.

The sector frames it as speed, not space

Read the documents from Vewin, the Association of Provinces (IPO) and the drinking water companies, and the story is always the same: permitting is too slow, provinces must “pick up the pace”, lead times must come down. The Hapert case, where an expansion of extraction was stalled for years, is cited as the symbol of a “lack of urgency in permitting”.

We do not dispute that framing because the procedures are fast enough — they are not. We dispute it because it places the cause in the wrong spot. A drinking water extraction site is not an administrative act with environmental effects as a side issue. It is an intervention in the water system of an entire area, and that intervention directly affects the interests of everyone in that same area who needs water, land or space. The slowness is not the problem. The slowness is the symptom of an underlying conflict of interests that no one has organised.

What really collides underground

Establishing a new groundwater extraction site means that farmers in the vicinity may extract less to irrigate their land. If the intended reserve lies beneath or beside a Natura 2000 area, extraction can lead to the desiccation of protected nature — an effect that is rigorously tested in the permit procedure and that, just as with nitrogen, founders before the administrative court if the supporting evidence is not watertight. On top of that comes the spatial claim: new production locations require transport pipelines and protection zones, and these lay claim to land also designated for housing, agriculture or energy.

The so-called Supplementary Strategic Reserves — the areas provinces designate to be able to extract additional groundwater in the long term — illustrate the problem sharply. On paper they are policy; in practice they are barely materialising. Not because the permitting desk is jammed, but because designating such a reserve means imposing restrictions in advance on land users who as yet see no benefit in them. That is not a legal question. It is an environmental and stakeholder one.

The parallel with grid congestion is no coincidence

Anyone who has followed grid congestion in recent years will recognise the pattern unerringly. There, too, the shortage was first treated as a capacity and procedure problem: build substations faster, speed up the permits. Only when it emerged that every new high-voltage substation and every new cable ran into local opposition, spatial claims and objection procedures did it become clear that the gains lay not in the technology or the lead time, but in the surrounding area. Grid operators are now investing heavily in early stakeholder and environmental management, precisely because they have learned that an accelerated procedure without public support only hits the wall harder.

The drinking water sector now stands at that same point — but a few years earlier in the learning curve. The temptation is great to repeat the energy sector’s mistake: cry out for speed, and only engage the surroundings once the extraction plans are already fixed. By then it is too late. By then participation is an announcement, not a conversation, and the path to the Council of State lies ready.

”But the procedures really are too slow”

The main counterargument deserves an honest answer. Yes, permitting takes too long, and yes, provinces can strengthen capacity and direction. We are not arguing against acceleration — we are arguing against acceleration without stakeholder and environmental management. A procedure that produces a permit in record time which then sits before the administrative court for years has accelerated nothing. Speed at the front without support produces delay at the back.

The only acceleration that counts is the kind that shortens the whole trajectory — including the objection and appeal phase. And that phase is not shortened with legal tricks, but by organising the conflict of interests before the permit is on the table: by having farmers, nature organisations, municipalities and residents at the table during the exploratory phase, by investigating desiccation effects together with nature managers instead of receiving them as a surprise in a formal objection, and by linking the designation of strategic reserves to what the area itself gains from them.

Our call

Treat the drinking water challenge for what it is: a spatial and societal task, not a permitting backlog. That requires three things. First, place stakeholder and environmental management at the front of every extraction plan, not as the final step but as the starting point of the exploration. Second, link the designation of Supplementary Strategic Reserves to an area process in which land users help decide the conditions, instead of having a restriction imposed on them. Third, treat the desiccation and nitrogen assessment not as a legal hurdle at the end, but as a design task at the beginning, together with the nature managers.

Drinking water is too fundamental to follow the same learning path as the energy sector — with years of delay, suspended decisions and a sector that concludes in hindsight that the real work lay in the surroundings. That insight already exists. The question is whether, this time, we dare to apply it at the front.

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