Résumé
The European Union adopted in 2000 a water framework directive (WFD) that encompasses many possible variations. What it means for practical water management is far from being explicit. Rather, its concrete implications slowly emerge from national and infra-national implementations. In this article, we account for the two-way translations of the WFD at domestic and EU levels: (i) how peculiar domestic coalitions took the WFD as an opportunity to promote their agendas; (ii) how the European Commission selected domestic experiments to identify allies and to flesh out an otherwise merely procedural norm. We do so by revisiting the results of a European project we were involved in, which focused on three "innovations" for the implementation of the WFD in the Weser watershed (Germany), in the Thau basin (France) and in the Brabant Delta (Netherlands). First, we document the stakes behind the translations of the WFD into what was presented as local innovations. Second, we analyse how, through these experiments, domestic actors, the European Commission and the researchers enrolled -- and were enrolled by -- each other. Adapted from the source document.