From Commitments to Collective Action
Dani Gaillard-Picher (4th from left), Senior Policy Advisor in SIWI after a session at the UN 2023 Water Conference. Credit: SIWI How can we move the many commitments of the Water Action Agenda into collective action? In this blog post, SIWI’s Senior Policy Advisor Dani Gaillard-Picher points to the need for shared responsibility, leadership and closer cross-sectoral collaboration in order to quadruple impact for the 2030 Agenda. She shares a vision of gender-transformative and poly-centric governance that will enable progress.
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.
“We all need to drive the momentum forward by becoming leaders for change within our own spheres of influence and inspiring others to act. A poly-centric governance system is emerging where action is no longer top-down nor bottom-up, but both need to co-exist and advance together. ”
The Water Action Agenda will also have to be gender transformative. A majority of the planet’s population is female, yet women remain largely marginalized, especially from higher level (water-related) decision-making and planning processes. According to UN Water, involving women can increase the effectiveness of water projects between six and seven times. Also, gender inclusive peace processes have been found to last longer and be more resilient.
Progress will also require solid leadership, not only from a UN Envoy for Water and Sanitation, but leadership and accountability from each of us to assume our shared responsibility for making sure we advance on the Water Action Agenda together. We all need to drive the momentum forward by becoming leaders for change within our own spheres of influence and inspiring others to act. A poly-centric governance system is emerging where action is no longer top-down nor bottom-up, but both need to co-exist and advance together.
At SIWI we stand ready to move the Water Action Agenda forward in collaboration with others through the World Water Week, the Action Platform for Source-to-Sea Management, the Water for Climate Pavilion Collective, and the International Center for Water Cooperation, to name just a few.
As we are reminded by this year’s World Water Day campaign, we can all be the change we wish to see in the world.
