From Commitments to Collective Action

One of the successes of the UN 2023 Water Conference was the collection of over 700 commitments to the Water Action Agenda. While it will take some time to fully understand the extent of what commitments are there and how they relate to each other, the real challenge now is to breathe life into it, so that the actions may carry us closer towards the Future We Want. This ongoing collective action exercise, to be driven by all of us, will need to create simplicity within complexity by organizing action into smaller, more specific multi-stakeholder constituencies, each contributing to broader systemic change. Accordingly, we will need a set of consistent coordination mechanisms to enable all actors involved to self-organize, to meet and converge thinking over the long-term towards common goals. And ultimately people—politicians and organizations—will need to actually deliver on what they say they will do. 

As we have all heard, reaching SDG6 will require quadrupling our impact. We can do more, better, when we tackle the challenges together. And that means reaching out to other communities, such as those of health, food, energy, oceans, climate, and finance, for example. Those communities need water to be successful, and they need the water community to help them to become better stewards for it. We are only going to obtain the critical mass for exponential growth in impact if we get non-water people as excited about water as we are. When we will finally succeed at bridging silos to foster this cross-sectoral cooperation through a systems thinking approach, we will then all benefit from more robust decisions, policies, and investments born of that cooperation.