This report assesses the current trends, drivers, obstacles, mechanisms, impacts, costs and benefits of stakeholder engagement in the water sector. It builds on empirical data collected through an extensive survey across 215 stakeholders, within and outside the water sector, and 69 case studies collected worldwide. It highlights the increasing importance of stakeholder engagement in the water sector as a principle of good governance and the need for better understanding of the pressing and emerging issues related to stakeholder engagement. These include: the shift of power across stakeholders; the arrival of new entrants that ought to be considered; the external and internal drivers that have triggered engagement processes; innovative tools that have emerged to manage the interface between multiple players, and types of costs and benefits incurred by engagement at policy and project levels. This report provides pragmatic policy guidance to decision makers and practitioners in the form of key principles and a Checklist for Public Action with indicators, international references and self-assessment questions, which together can help policy makers to set up the appropriate framework conditions needed to yield the short and long-term benefits of stakeholder engagement.
This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Water Governance, Stakeholder Engagement, and Sustainable Water Resources Management" that was published in Water
Building on a survey of 48 cities in OECD countries and emerging economies, the report analyses key factors affecting urban water governance, discusses trends in allocating roles and responsibilities across levels of government, and assesses multi-level governance gaps in urban water management.
Three years after the adoption of the OECD Water Governance Principles, this report takes stock of their use and evolving practices, and provides an indicator framework building on lessons learned from their implementation in different countries and contexts.
The report is the result of a policy dialogue with more than 200 stakeholders at different levels in Argentina. It assesses water governance in Argentina, identifies several key challenges to effective, efficient and inclusive water policies, and provides a set of policy recommendations to enhance water governance as a means to address relevant societal challenges, both within the scope of water management and beyond.
The objective of this book is to broadly illustrate the key aspects of water governance, mapping the spectrum of decision-making from techno-centric and eco-centric approaches, to hybrid concepts and people-centric approaches. Topics covered include the challenges for water-governance models, the polycentric model, the integration challenge, water in the decision-making hierarchy, and the rise of water-sensitive design, while also taking into account interdependencies between stakeholders, as well as the issue of scale. The book’s content is presented in an integrated and comprehensive format, building on detailed case studies from around the world and the authors’ working experiences in the water sector. Combining essential insights with accessible, non-technical language, it offers a valuable resource for academics, technicians and policy-makers alike.
The science–policy interface is critical to the design and implementation of water policies. In theory, scientists provide policy makers with robust facts and data that can help guide decision making, and lessons from the political economy of reforms can push scientific boundaries further to trigger further research for wise solutions. While evidence-based policy is obviously desirable, in practice such a connection is not always straightforward. Another assumption behind the science–policy gap is the discrepancy between scientists and policy makers in terms of culture, process, timing, language and expected outcome. This book tries to reconcile this discrepancy through a multi-stakeholder approach to authoring its different articles. This joint initiative between the OECD – particularly its Water Governance Initiative – and the International Water Resources Association seeks to provide a canvas for grounding water policy in science, and vice versa. The objective of this book, devoted to the OECD Principles on Water Governance, is to use the OECD Principles as a common thread across the articles to draw lessons from theoretical work and practical experiences in water governance reforms; but also to only feature papers authored by groups of diverse stakeholders from different institutional backgrounds. This book was originally published as a special issue of Water International.
This report uses the OECD Principles on Water Governance as a tool for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue and practical assessment of the performance of flood governance systems. It applies the Principles to flood-prone contexts to help strengthen governance frameworks for managing the risks of “too much” water.
This report addresses multilevel governance challenges in water policy implementation and identifies good practices for coordinating water policy across ministries, between levels of government, and across local actors at subnational level.