Water Cooperation – building partnerships
2013
has by the UN General Assembly been declared the 'International Year of
Water Cooperation'. The questions to be addressed in 2013 include: why
do we need to cooperate, on what, for what aim, at what level, with whom
and, not least, how?
With an expected world population of more
than 9 billion people by 2050, basically depending on the same finite
and vulnerable water resource as today for sustaining life and
wellbeing, our inter-dependence is growing every day. In 2015 we shall
take stock of the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs), and a process of developing a new set of Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs), has been initiated as an outcome of the UN Conference on
Sustainable Development, 'Rio +20', in June 2012. The Rio +20 outcome
document clearly states water as one key area for achieving sustainable
development and thus on important part of the upcoming SGDs and post
2015 development framework.
We need to understand how 'my water
use' effect everybody else's, and enter into meaningful and informed
dialogues with other people and communities of practice, inside and
outside the 'water box', engaged in using, or wasting or polluting, our
common and shared water resource. In this endeavour we need to engage
with groups of people who can help us understand the very essence of
cooperation: what is cooperation? What drives people, states and
organisations to 'cooperate' rather than 'defect'? What determines the
direct and indirect reciprocities that make us cooperate, and the
mechanisms of selection of those with whom we want to do so? And how do
we identify and measure the quality, aim, benefits and barriers to
cooperation, and create an enabling environment for cooperation? How can
more effective cooperation enable us to reach future-oriented decisions
and force implementation, and how can we best build partnerships among
actors to achieve common goals?
In the following thematic scope
of the 2013 World Water Week in Stockholm in is formulated from the
perspective of the 'what's and who's'; but in developing the workshops,
seminars and other events the 'how' questions must be central. Each
workshop will also review the progress made in water cooperation.
Perspectives
for building partnerships, advance future water cooperation and find
solutions to the world’s water related challenges will be explored.
Cooperation between actors in different sectors - optimising benefits to water
Cooperation
between actors in different sectors is essential for proper water
development and management, and water managers need to reach out and
work closely with actors in most of sectors of society. Water as an
important driver of economic and social development needs to be
addressed by people both 'inside and outside of the water box'.
With
renewed global focus on the 'green economy', and the challenge of
meeting the sharply increasing food and energy demands, the need to
address water, energy and food security as a particularly important
'nexus' has been highlighted. This calls for increased cooperation
between these fields, with an ecosystems services perspective, sharing
water benefits, costs and risks, and cooperating with the stakeholders
concerned. A shared understanding and analysis of the economic and
financing aspects is a prerequisite for meaningful cooperation.
Ensuring
adequate domestic water supply and sanitation, not least in the rapidly
growing urban centres, and satisfying the need of other strongly water
dependent sectors, such as industry, tourism/recreation and transport,
also calls for cross-sectoral collaboration.
Cooperation between stakeholder groups - recognising water as a common good
The
right to safe drinking water and sanitation has been recognised as a
human right by the UN; for all other uses government has a
responsibility to ensure the optimum allocation and management of the
water resource for the whole of society. This calls for the involvement
of all relevant stakeholder groups, and for getting central and local
governments, civil society organisations, private sector, academia and
practitioners to the same table.
Taking this involvement 'outside
the water box' to a broader group of stakeholders requires working with
all actors in the supply chain, referred to as 'field-to-fork',
'field-to-fuel tank', 'cradle-to-grave' etc.
In this process,
involvement of civil society organisations, and the general public, is
not only a question of information; transparency and inclusiveness in
decision-making requires early identification, consultation and
involvement of those who will share the benefits, those who 'lose', bear
the costs and run the risks. In this context it is important to
recognise that cooperation needs to involve all people and cultures,
ensure gender equality, work with and build on youth as the foundation
of our future, and respect cultural values while bridging to ethnic and
tribal groups.
An increasingly important stakeholder group for
effective water development and management is the private sector. This
includes both large-scale and small-scale enterprises for whom safe
access to water, and water efficient production, is important in the
face of the challenges of increased water scarcity. Private
infrastructure investors and developers share similar concerns, and are
faced with increasing demands for achieving environmental and social
sustainability of infrastructure developments. Effective
public-private-civic partnerships to ensure dialogue, and share
benefits, costs and risks, are critical to make this work.
Water
is a local resource, but cooperation on water also needs to be global.
Enhancing the 'north-south' and 'south-south' cooperation between high
income, transitional and low income regions and countries is a
continuous challenge. However, the traditional divides between 'north'
and 'south' are rapidly changing in a globalising world, and so are the
mechanisms of cooperation.
Cooperation across traditional management - from hilltop to ocean
Managing
water means different things to different 'water communities':
freshwater resources management, often divided into specialties around
rivers, lakes, groundwater and glaciers; drinking water and sanitation
management; wastewater management; coastal zone management etc. These
communities again divide into different communities around the purpose
of water development and management, such as different economic use
sectors; ecosystems and habitats; climate change, disasters etc.
Although all of these communities address water as a vital resource for
society, they often live separate lives without much communication
between them. Bridging these management divides is a major water
cooperation challenge to achieve coherence in policies and practices.
Many
such relevant 'management communities' could be mentioned, but some of
the more obvious relate to land, ecosystems and oceans, as well as to
the linkages to climate change and disaster risk reduction. Land
management is critical to water management: managing water with the land
from 'green' to 'blue' and 'grey' water, and managing land rights and
tenure, land use and management, and land acquisition, as key
determinants to water governance. Although the concept of integrated
water resources management (IWRM) explicitly mentions the land-water
linkage, in practice it is often forgotten.
The
outcome document of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development 'Rio
+20' states the need to 'significantly reduce water pollution' and
'significantly improve wastewater treatment'. These long neglected
issues require significant intersectoral cooperation to address the
serious backlog that exists.
Similarly, in a world with increased
competition for scarce water, maintaining and developing ecosystem
integrity and functions are critical. Ecosystem services for human
livelihoods and biodiversity, integrating IWRM and ecosystem approaches,
along with environmental flows, strategic environmental assessment
(SEA) etc. are all important aspects to include. Relevant ecosystems to
water management are terrestrial and aquatic. The continuum of water
management from 'hilltop-to-ocean (H2O)', or 'ridge-to-reef', does not
always receive the attention required. Bridging the
freshwater-coastal-ocean management divide, reconciling and coordinating
IWRM and integrated coastal zone management (ICM), is still a major
challenge.
Mainstreaming water and disaster management, from
'prevention to cure', learning from the relief phases to establish
cooperation for prevention, including through integrated flood
management (IFM), integrated drought management (IDM) and coastal
flooding preparedness (hurricanes, tsunamis etc.) calls for the two
traditionally rather separate communities to come together. Although
water related disasters have always been with us, and always will be,
indications are that climate change may accelerate both the frequencies
and severity of disasters. Considering and mainstreaming climate change
mitigation and adaptation is an added dimension of good water
governance. This calls for bridging the 'water-climate community'
divide, and building water-energy alliances for improved synergies
between adaptation and mitigation.
Cooperation between jurisdictions and levels - from village to transboundary basin
Water
follows its own hydrologic boundaries, and implementing IWRM principles
in practice needs to focus at the basin level by bridging
administrative boundaries (districts, municipalities/cities, provinces,
states), involving all relevant stakeholder groups, while respecting
overall policies, strategies and laws set at the national level. This
involves a combination of top-down and bottom-up processes, practicing
IWRM thinking in water governance from small watersheds, through
sub-basins to basins/tributaries to transboundary basins (rivers, lakes,
aquifers), and building sustainable institutions at all levels to do
so.
When basins transcend jurisdictional boundaries and become
'transboundary', be they between provinces, states or countries,
political dimensions enter into the equation. Managing transboundary
waters often start at the technical/scientific level, before moving into
political cooperation, and thus 'hydro-diplomacy', with dialogues on
the sharing of water and water-related benefits and products, such as
food and energy, across boundaries. Evidence suggests that through
proper management water can become an economic win-win agent and a
'lubricant of peace'.
Cooperation between jurisdictions and
levels calls for collective action and stakeholder negotiations with
proper tools and processes to make cooperation actually happen. Such
processes need to recognise power perspectives and asymmetries, and the
risk of 'hijacking'. This does not always come easily, and the
equitability and quality of cooperation, as well as barriers in the form
of e.g. corruption and exclusion, are important to consider.
Cooperation between scientists and users - bridging the science-policy gap
Knowledge
must be shared based on context and needs of those involved, to develop
evidence-based policy, make decisions and raise awareness.
Science-policy gaps are common, often with too much 'science-push' and
insufficient attention to 'policy pull'.
To respond to the
challenge of communicating research findings to decision-makers and
practitioners, and ensure the science community responds to policy
needs, entails understanding of the latest thinking and understanding of
practical solutions to the various obstacles that can impede knowledge
sharing and application. This calls for informed dialogue, based on
inclusiveness, transparency and access to relevant data and information.
Making science relevant to policy-makers, bureaucrats, practitioners,
and not least to the public, is a major challenge, as is the
clarification by decision-makers of the kind of answers they need from
science. From basic to applied science, from short-term solutions to
long-term visions, the challenge is to clearly communicate technical and
scientific findings to decision-makers and practitioners, 'from
bookshelf to policy', from 'models to decision support systems'.
The
chain starts with education to form the scientists and politicians that
will close this gap in the future, and ends with the development and
implementation of policies that will change our behaviour towards a more
sustainable world of water.