Water management in Germany was traditionally organised around political-administrative units, and federal states had the principal competence to implement water-related policies. The river basin management approach introduced by the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) therefore required major changes in spatial and institutional organisation. In terms of capacity building, the process chair explained that stakeholders' knowledge of the WFD and water management in general improved over the course of the process. However, this assessment is questionable since participants themselves did not mention any form of learning and were generally very critical of the process. Conflict potential in the Hase sub-basin was relatively high at the beginning of the process, due mainly to tensions between agriculture and environmental groups. Feasibility was an important criterion for the selection of measures, and depended primarily on the availability of land on which to implement the measure, financing by private and/or public bodies, and the prioritisation of the water body in question.