Free Flow

[

] 192

Water for life: inspiring action and promoting

best practices in local cooperation

Josefina Maestu and Pilar Gonzalez-Meyaui, United Nations Office to Support the International Decade for Action

‘Water for Life’ 2005-2015/UN-Water Decade Programme on Advocacy and Communication

o achieve water security and sustainability, concerted

efforts must be made to promote water cooperation not

only in transboundary river basins and at river basin

scale, but also at local scale, including between irrigation

districts and cities. Cooperation is necessary to deal with major

issues such as the upstream and downstream impacts of water

pollution and water abstraction.

The United Nations Office to Support the International Decade for

Action ‘Water for Life’ 2005-2015/UN-Water Decade Programme on

Advocacy and Communication has supported the International Year

of Water Cooperation through UN-Water’s Water for Life Award and

the International Annual UN-Water Zaragoza Conference. In 2013

both these events aimed to promote best practices and the recogni-

tion of outstanding projects and programmes in water cooperation.

The award is open to projects or programmes achieving

particularly effective results in the field of water management or

in raising awareness on water issues. The International Annual

UN-Water Zaragoza Conference of 2013 identified

the tools and approaches to promote water coopera-

tion by sharing lessons from recent experiences. The

conference introduced the key skills required for

water cooperation, with particular attention to their

importance in the process of negotiation and media-

tion and examples of their application in national and

international water settings.

Local cooperation

The importance of local cooperation was highlighted at the

Annual Zaragoza Conference in 2013. It was recognized

that at the local level, coping with the growing needs of

water and sanitation services in cities is one of the most

pressing issues of this century. Sustainable, efficient and

equitable urban water management has never been as

important as it is today. Half of humanity now lives in

cities and in two decades three out of five inhabitants of

the planet will be urban dwellers. This urban growth is

faster in the developing world and it creates unprecedented

challenges. The relationship between water and cities is

crucial. Cities require a very large input of fresh water and

in turn have a huge impact on freshwater systems.

Cities have proved to be sources of innovation in water

management, creating new models for water and sani-

tation service delivery and financing. High demand for

better services and pressures on scarce resources can drive

innovation and improvements or lead to real hardships

and environmental damage. The pressures are especially

acute in the peri-urban periphery where governance defi-

cits are frequent. Stakeholder engagement and public

participation are key to the coordination of various actors

and interests in cities.

Many problems can only be solved

by ensuring collaboration among different stakeholders.

Urban water management faces some terrible problems,

but it is possible to facilitate improvements in horizon-

tal and vertical cooperation at global, national, city and

community/local platform levels.

Award-winning projects of the 2013 Water for Life

Award have also focused on water cooperation. They

have shown how reaching out to others beyond munici-

pal boundaries and engaging stakeholders to overcome

obstacles can be powerful in solving problems and

ensuring a sustainable future.

ater

ooperation

, S

ustainability

and

overty

radication

Stakeholder cooperation in Zaragoza

Stakeholder cooperation in Zaragoza has been built through seven initiatives:

• saving 1 Hm

in domestic water consumption in one year in Zaragoza

(mainly focused on habit changes)

• training the city: 50 good practices (technological changes)

• 160,000 public commitments to water saving

• solving water conflicts through social mediation

• a scream for water as a human right: the Pavilion for Citizen Initiatives, El

Faro

• ZINNAE, urban cluster for water efficiency

• a water alliance for Central America: Water Nexus.

A number of lessons have been learned from these experiences. For

example, it is necessary to invest time and resources in order to build trust

among the actors participating in these multi-sector projects. Identifying a

collective and shared challenge and ensuring that objectives are simple,

concrete and achievable is crucial to success. Objectives also need to be

attractive to the general public.

‘Triple therapy’ (new public regulation, civic awareness/active citizens

and responsible market instruments) requires a cooperative environment

between three main actors: public administrations, NGOs and business

entities. It is important to create a motivational core of entities committed

to the project, and the role of the facilitator is crucial in translating cultures,

integrating different approaches, mediating between partners with conflicting

views and managing the egos of partners and other involved entities. It is

also important to identify an active minority that can become a network of

allies for change. In addition to all these elements, patience is essential to

build up the revolution we need in water management.