Free Flow

Water Cooperation, Sustainability and Poverty Eradication
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
To 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 recognition
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
Stakeholder cooperation in Zaragoza
Stakeholder cooperation in Zaragoza has been built through seven initiatives:
• saving 1 Hm 3 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. 3
UN-Water Zaragoza Conference of 2013 identified
the tools and approaches to promote water cooperation
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 mediation
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 sanitation
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 deficits
are frequent. Stakeholder engagement and public
participation are key to the coordination of various actors
and interests in cities. 1 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 horizontal
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 municipal
boundaries and engaging stakeholders to overcome
obstacles can be powerful in solving problems and
ensuring a sustainable future.
[ 192 ]