Americas ok.indd - World Water Council

624th World Water Forum6. SUCCESSFULLOCAL ACTIONSin the regionThe overarching theme of the 4th World Water Forum“Local Actions for a Global Challenge” was selected withthe objective of encouraging debate and fostering newinitiatives to deal with the great challenges faced by localactors. In this context, one of the main components of theForum is the presentation of local experiences and actionswhich have been carried out throughout the world. Theseexperiences and local actions will be shared between thedifferent countries around the world in order to help themcreate better well being conditions for their inhabitants.The Forum Secretariat defined a local action as follows:“An activity or group of activities focused on solvingan identified problem faced by a local stakeholdergroup in the management of their water resourcesor services. It is not necessarily a “project”, but canencompass a variety of interconnected activities aimedat addressing a particular issue. The scale of a localaction depends on the scale of the problem focused onand is the scale at which an effective solution can beimplemented.”The Forum Secretariat established the following procedurefor the submission and selection of the local actionsto be presented at the Forum: (i) register the proposedlocal action through the Forum website, November 15 thbeing the deadline for registration; (ii) evaluate registeredlocal actions by the Regional Committees according tocriteria decided by their members; (iii) integrate a database with all actions that received a certain qualificationlevel defined by each Regional Committee; and (iv) selectthe local actions to be presented at each session by eachsession convener.The Regional Committee of the Americas was theonly one that established an Evaluation Committee. Thecriteria for selecting the members of this Committeeincluded the following: (i) geographic distribution (North,Central, and South America, and the Caribbean); (ii) genderrepresentation (at least 40% presented by women); (iii)civil society representation (at least one member pertheme representing the civil society); (iv) knowledge andexperience on the theme according to each thematic topic;and (v) acceptance of the nomination and commitmentto accomplish the task. The mandate of the EvaluationCommittee was to recommend a short-list of “localactors” that would be invited to participate directly in theactual Forum meeting, by making presentations of theirexperiences at the project and policy level. It is believedthat in this manner, the results in selecting outstandinglocal actions, as well as the process by which publicparticipation and transparency are directly supported, wasan important contribution to the Forum.The structure of the Evaluation Committee of theAmericas was discussed at the COA meeting in June 2005in Tabasco, Mexico, and it was agreed to have groups of 3persons for each thematic area, with one of them comingfrom the civil society sector. The committee was comprisedof 5 sub-working groups, to reflect the five thematic areasof the Forum itself. The composition of the Committees isshown in Table 6.1. As of December 22 nd , 26 countries hadregistered local actions, distributed as shown in Figure 6.1.