Institute of Development Studies

Liquid Dynamics at World Water Week

Julia Day, STEPS Centre Communications Manager

The official theme of the 19th annual World Water Week is ‘accessing water for the common good’. But one question is preying on the minds of the 2,500 delegates from 136 countries present in Stockholm this week is more focused: with less than three months to go, how best to make the strongest possible case for global action at the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen (COP-15)?

There appears to be a consensus developing among the gathered scientists, policymakers, business leaders, NGOs: that the water community cannot stay in its silo any longer – it must join forces with the climate change and development in order to exact meaningful change at COP-15 in December.

On Thursday the water sector’s political heavyweights waded in to the debate when a panel made up of water Ministers from around the world were asked to explain how they will initiate stronger collective action on water and climate change impacts at COP-15.

Henk van Schaik, of the Cooperative Programme on Water and Climate (CPWC) set the tone: ‘The water community stands ready to cooperate with the climate community on planning processes, actions and capacity’.

Tineke Huizinga, Vice Minister for Transport, Public Works and Water Management of The Netherlands said: ‘Adaptation will be one of four blocks of negotiation at COP-15. Water management deserves due attention and cannot be missed in adaptation strategies of any country. Therefore water cannot be missed in the COP statement.’

She called for the water community to collaborate with other ‘sectors’ ahead of COP-15: ‘We have a lot in common with the development community therefore we should join forces…It is now time to act on adaptation, we must prepare ourselves,’ said Ms Huizinga. ‘This would be an amazing opportunity to link development and water to reach the MDGs.’

Tanzania’s Minister for Water and Irrigation, Mark Mwandosoya, told delegates that climate change scenarios in Tanzania suggest temperature increases of between 1-3 degrees centigrade over next 100 years. Floods and droughts are going to become even more frequent, said Mr Mwandosoya, and in a country where agriculture accounts for 80 per cent of jobs, water is crucial: ‘Water is life. It is a key resource as it affects all other sectors of the economy.’

Gunilla Carlsson, Minister for International Development Cooperation, Sweden, said: ‘Sweden is putting adaptation to climate change on the agenda to COP-15 – and we are deeply committed to an ambitious outcome.’ According to Ms Carlsson, gender equality is key to success: ‘For the majority of woman a better life depends on safe, fresh water…they have a crucial role in all water activities.’

Syed Ashraful Islam, Minister of Local Government, Rural Development & Cooperatives, Bangladesh, was concerned above all else with effective and equitable management of trans-boundary waters, unsurprisingly given his country’s geography: ‘Bangladesh alone has 57 common rivers with other countries…it is often difficult to come to a consensus for sharing [the rivers] and we are lacking international mechanisms and understanding in UN on how to share common rivers.

‘We must adopt a resolution in Copenhagen for all UN states to share common rivers and water bodies in a better way and we must correlate water management with land and forest management,’ said the Bangladeshi Minister.

Advocating a more interconnected view of water and sanitation to reveal new pathways to pro-poor sustainability and social justice is one of the themes of the STEPS Centre’s session in Stockholm.

STEPS Centre water and sanitation team’s event examines the concept of ‘liquid dynamics’ - patterns of interaction between social, technological and ecological dimensions of water and sanitation that are rarely addressed together, but should be.

Research in peri-urban areas for the STEPS Centre and Community-Led Total Sanitation at IDS has highlighted a disconnect between globalised assessments and local people’s understandings of ‘liquid dynamics’.

Meanwhile powerful actors’ framings of scarcity legitimise certain interventions that do not benefit all. The divergent framings of local users, engineers and scientists, and their ideas of sustainability and their goals, are rarely taken in to account.

The STEPS Centre’s pathways approach focuses on working with uncertainty in a highly complex world of dynamic social, technological and ecological processes, where conflicting priorities exist amongst different people.

Duncan Pollard of World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said in Stockholm that we need to embrace uncertainty in water management: ‘But uncertainty is no excuse for inaction – we need to start now and act fast. There needs to be a willingness in terms of managing uncertainty and the need to develop water management institutions and processes that operate with uncertainty,’ said Mr Pollard.

Conventional analysis and policy approaches are well-attuned to handling risk, but are inadequate where these other kinds of incertitude prevail. But dynamic systems and contexts involve various forms of uncertainty, and we need options that are flexible and adaptable enough to work in this rapidly changing environment.

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