Bridging Borders: A conversation with Jon Lane
World Water Week 2024 has the theme of Bridging Borders: Water for a Peaceful and Sustainable Future. What does Bridging Borders mean, and what are the different angles of the 2024 theme? Get the answers from Jon Lane, Chair of the World Water Week Scientific Programme Committee.
Could you explain what is meant by the title of Bridging Borders?
This year, we take an optimistic, glass-half-full approach at World Water Week about how water and working together on water can help to increase peace and reduce conflict. This approach overrides the common misconception around the use of water as a force of destruction during warfare.
Borders are not only those that exist between nations but also barriers or misunderstandings that can arise between individual water users or neighbouring communities. For example, there may exist economic competition between urban residents and countryside farmers over the equitable distribution of water.
Bridging borders means bringing these different groups of people together to understand each other’s positions so that they can then look to the future hand in hand to see how they can help each other.
Similarly, national governments along a particular river basin, can take on joint responsibility for transboundary management or in other words managing their shared waters, aquifers and wetlands.
Several such examples and cases will be presented during sessions in Stockholm, to showcase how dialogue improves the political and diplomatic relationship between countries when they collaborate around water.
“Borders are not only those that exist between nations but also barriers or misunderstandings that can arise between individual water users or neighbouring communities. ”
The theme brings together water, peace, and sustainability. Could you outline the connection between the three?
Improved water management and cooperation over water will lead to increased security, collaboration and mutual understanding, and therefore peace. And for any achievements and improvements to become sustainable, one of the prerequisites is the ability to maintain peace.
What are the most pressing challenges around water, peace, and security that we need to overcome?
Water itself and on its own cannot solve everything – that is an idealistic perspective. Water will contribute to solving challenges, but the biggest challenge that I see is the deeply embedded behaviours of aggression, violence and disagreement in our psyche as a species.
Water people or peace diplomats need to be prepared to face disappointments and persevere at the same time.
The second most pressing challenge is that of climate change which is a risk multiplier. As conditions worsen, people will become increasingly desperate. For example, those relying on subsistence farming could get pushed to starvation.
Therefore, security also encompasses human security, food and nutrition security, ecosystems security, economic security and military security.
What do you look forward to the most during this year’s World Water Week?
I’m looking forward to learning from colleagues who are specialists in peace and peace building and mediation. Professionals in this space don’t necessarily attend World Water Week each year.
Over the past few years, we have strived to promote World Water Week as a meeting about water for all people.
So we’re really welcoming colleagues from other professional backgrounds to come. I’m looking forward to listening and learning from them and witness how the work that we do as water professionals can fit into their framework of thinking, and their worldviews.
Join SIWI at World Water Week
World Water Week 2024 is centred on water cooperation, for peace and security in its broadest sense. SIWI is convening a wide range of sessions and events, bridging borders across sectors, topics and people.
SIWI at World Water Week 2024
- Water and climate
- World Water Week
- Water governance
- Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH)
- Water governance
- Gender and water
- Resilience through water
