Recent impactful hydrometeorological events, on both the extreme wet and dry side of the spectrum, remind policymakers and citizens that climate change is a reality and that a shift in water management solutions is required. A selection of policy-shaping events in the Netherlands shows that both floods and droughts have occurred historically and continue to occur, causing significant impacts and challenges for water resources management. For decades, water management in the Netherlands has focused on implementing flood prevention policies, mostly prompted by specific events. The occurrence of droughts did not lead to comparable significant transitions in water management. The bias toward adaptation measures on the wet part of the spectrum (i.e., floods), increases vulnerability to dry extremes (i.e., droughts) as experienced in 2018–2020 and 2022. A required long-term, integral vision to rethink the existing water management system is challenging as droughts and floods act on different time scales. Furthermore, there is a fierce competition for land use and water use functions. ‘Transformation pathways’, applied across the full flood–drought spectrum, could provide a valuable framework in the development toward a sustainable management of water resources, involving stakeholders for just and equitable transitions and translating long-term visions into pathways for action.

Inter-jurisdictional water resource issues constitute a growing political and economic challenge in China. This article examines three such cases of hydropolitics, namely large dam construction, water resource allocation, and downstream water pollution, through the lens of central–local relations. It argues that the hydropolitics in China are characterized by the pursuit of localized preferences within the constraints imposed by a centralized political system. In each case, the primary actors are sub-national administrative units, who adopt various competitive strategies to pursue their own localized interests at the expense of neighbouring jurisdictions. This article argues that although vertical control mechanisms in the Chinese system effectively limit central–local preference divergence, they do little to contain horizontal conflicts between sub-national administrative units. The paucity of formal inter-jurisdictional dispute resolution mechanisms is a major barrier to meeting water resource challenges, and inter-jurisdictional collective action problems are likely to pose growing difficulties for the Chinese political system.